Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage

Citation preview

BEN JONSON: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES General Editor: B.C.Southam The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a literary tradition. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s death.

BEN JONSON THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Edited by

D H.CRAIG

London and New York

First Published in 1990 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Compilation, introduction, notes and index © 1990 D H.Craig All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN 0-203-19451-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19454-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-13417-X (Print Edition)

General Editor’s Preface

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures. The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenthand twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative quality—perhaps even registering incomprehension! For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writer’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear. In each volume the documents are headed by an introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged. B.C.S.

Contents

PREFACE

xiii

NOTE

xv

ABBREVIATIONS

xvi

INTRODUCTION

1

1

JOHN WEEVER, Marston and Jonson, 1599

29

2

BEN JONSON, Every Man out of his Humour, 1599

31

3

BEN JONSON, prologue to Cynthia’s Revels, 1600

37

4

JOHN WEEVER, Jonson as humorist, 1601

39

5

NICHOLAS BRETON on the satirical fashion, 1601

41

6

BEN JONSON, Poetaster, 1601

43

7

THOMAS DEKKER, Horace untrussed, 1601–2

51

8

CHARLES FITZGEFFREY on Jonson, 1601

67

9

Cambridge views on the War of the Theatres, 1601–2

69

10

HENRY CHETTLE, Jonson’s steel pen, 1603

71

11

SAMUEL DANIEL attacks the learned masque, 1604

73

12

THOMAS DEKKER on Jonson’s pedantry, 1604

75

13

JOHN MARSTON, tribute to Jonson, 1604

77

14

SIR EDWARD HERBERT on Jonson’s Horace, 1604

79

15

Jonson as laureate, 1605

81

16

On Sejanus, 1605

83

17

JOHN MARSTON glances at Sejanus, 1606

89

18

BEN JONSON on his masques, 1606

91

19

On Volpone, 1605–7

93

vii

20

BEN JONSON, more principles for the masque, 1609

99

21

Jonson’s comedy malicious and factious, 1610

101

22

BEN JONSON, prologue to The Alchemist, 1610

103

23

On Catiline, 1611

105

24

JOHN SELDEN on Jonson’s scholarship, 1614

109

25

BEN JONSON, Bartholomew Fair, 1614

111

26

On Jonson’s epigrams, 1615

113

27

WILLIAM FENNOR on the reception of Sejanus, 1616

115

28

ROBERT ANTON, Jonson among the melancholic creators, 1616

117

29

From The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 1616

119

30

WILLIAM DRUMMOND, Jonson’s character, 1619

123

31

INIGO JONES, attack on Jonson, 1619 or later

125

32

EDMUND BOLTON on Jonson’s language, 1621

127

33

GEORGE CHAPMAN, expostulation with Jonson, 1623 or later

129

34

BEN JONSON on The Staple of News, 1626

135

35

NICHOLAS OLDISWORTH on Jonson, 1629

137

36

Controversy over The New Inn, 1629–31

139

37

FALKLAND on Jonson as the dispenser of fame, 1631 or earlier

151

38

LEONARD DIGGES, Shakespeare’s plays more popular than Jonson’s, (?) 1632

155

39

THOMAS RANDOLPH on the power of Jonson’s verses, 1632 or later

159

40

BEN JONSON, The Magnetic Lady, 1632

161

41

ALEXANDER GILL, attack on The Magnetic Lady, 1633

165

42

JAMES HOWELL, letters to Jonson, 1632–5

167

43

SIR JOHN SUCKLING, caricature of Jonson, 1637 or earlier

169

44

BEN JONSON, prologue to The Sad Shepherd, 1637 or earlier

171

45

SIR JOHN SUCKLING, Jonson’s arrogance, 1637

173

46

JAMES SHIRLEY on Jonson and The Alchemist, between 1637 and 1640

175

47

NEWCASTLE, tribute to Jonson, 1637 or later

177

48

GEORGE STUTVILE, Jonson as tutor, 1637 or later

179

49

Tributes from Jonsonus Virbius, 1638

181

viii

50

GEORGE DANIEL, elegy on Jonson, 1638

207

51

JOHN BENSON, dedication of Jonson’s Poems, 1640

209

52

On Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, 1640

211

53

JAMES SHIRLEY on Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson, 1642

215

54

WILLIAM CARTWRIGHT on Jonson’s love-scenes, 1647

217

55

ROBERT HERRICK, tributes to Jonson, 1648

219

56

EDMUND GAYTON, Jonson the scholar’s playwright, 1654

221

57

On reviving Jonson at the Restoration, 1660

223

58

SAMUEL PEPYS on performances of Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair, 1661

225

59

The Play of the Puritan, 1661

227

60

MARGARET CAVENDISH on Jonson’s plays, 1662

229

61

THOMAS FULLER, portrait of Jonson, 1662

231

62

RICHARD FLECKNOE, Jonson’s part in the history of the English stage, 1664

233

63

SAMUEL PEPYS on performances of Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair, 1664–5

235

64

SAINT-EVREMOND, Jonson central to a French view of English comedy, 1666–7

237

65

SAMUEL BUTLER on Jonson and Shakespeare, 1667–9

241

66

SAMUEL PEPYS reads Every Man in his Humour, sees Epicoene, 1667

243

67

JOHN DRYDEN’S Essay, 1667

245

68

JOHN DRYDEN makes Shakespeare monarch over Fletcher and Jonson, 1667

255

69

JOHN DRYDEN, Jonson’s borrowings, 1668

257

70

THOMAS SHADWELL on Jonson’s humour comedy, 1668

259

71

JOHN DRYDEN cites Jonson in the controversy over rhymed drama, 1668

261

72

SAMUEL PEPYS on Bartholomew Fair, Epicoene, Catiline, and The Alchemist, 1668–9

263

73

CLARENDON on Jonson’s talents and achievements, 1668–70

267

74

CHARLES SACKVILLE, epilogue to an Every Man in his Humour revival, 1670

269

ix

75

RICHARD FLECKNOE answers Dryden on Jonson, 1670–1

271

76

JOHN DRYDEN explains his view of Jonson, 1671

273

77

THOMAS SHADWELL defends his estimate of Jonson, 1670–1

277

78

EDWARD HOWARD on Jonson, 1671

281

79

EDWARD HOWARD on Jonson’s imaginary creations, 1671

285

80

EDWARD RAVENSCROFT, Jonson the model for didactic comedy, 1671

287

81

On Jonson and Shakespeare, 1672

289

82

JOHN DRYDEN on the faults of predecessors like Jonson, 1672

291

83

APHRA BEHN on Shakespeare and Jonson, 1673

297

84

EDWARD HOWARD, Jonson unparalleled among ancient or modern authors, 1673

299

85

EDWARD PHILLIPS on Jonson’s achievements, 1675

301

86

JOHN DRYDEN, Jonson distinguished from Shadwell, 1676

303

87

JOHN OLDHAM on Jonson, 1678

305

88

JOHN DRYDEN, low farce in Volpone, 1683

315

89

EDWARD HOWARD on Jonson’s allegory and on a statue of Jonson, 1689

317

90

GERALD LANGBAINE, notes on Jonson, 1691

319

91

THOMAS RYMER on Catiline, 1692

325

92

NAHUM TATE, farce in Jonson, 1693

329

93

JOHN DRYDEN, Jonson and Fletcher matched at last, 1694

331

94

BEAT LOUIS de MURALT on Jonson and Molière, 1694

333

95

WILLIAM WOTTON on Jonson’s Grammar, 1694, 1697

335

96

JOHN DENNIS and WILLIAM CONGREVE on Jonson’s comedy, 1695

337

97

JEREMY COLLIER on Jonson as a model playwright, 1698

343

98

WILLIAM CONGREVE and JEREMY COLLIER on profanity in Bartholomew Fair, 1698

347

99

WILLIAM BURNABY, Jonson a model for the comedy of characters and action, 1701

349

100

JOHN DENNIS on Jonson’s comedy, 1702

351

101

Jonson discussed in a critical dialogue on the theatre, 1702

353

x

102

Jonson returns from the shades to castigate Thomas Baker, 1704

355

103

SAMUEL COBB, Jonson’s notable thefts and successful piracies, 1707

357

104

RICHARD STEELE on Jonson, 1709

359

105

NICHOLAS ROWE, Jonson’s evil eye on Shakespeare, 1709

361

106

CHARLES GILDON on Jonson, 1710

363

107

RICHARD STEELE on Jonson’s plays as description and instruction, 1712

365

108

JOHN DENNIS, Jonson no guide to Shakespeare for tragedy, 1712

367

109

LEWIS THEOBALD as ‘Benjamin Johnson’, 1715

369

110

JOHN DENNIS on suggestibility in The Alchemist, 1718

371

111

JOHN DENNIS, Jonson invoked against Steele, 1720

373

112

CHARLES GILDON, Jonson the master of comedy, 1721

375

113

JOHN DENNIS, Jonson the authority for the comedy of ridicule, 1722

377

114

ALEXANDER POPE on the relations between Shakespeare and Jonson, 1725

379

115

ALEXANDER POPE, observations on Jonson, (?) 1728, 1733 or 1734

381

116

Shakespeare and the actors defended against Pope and Jonson, 1729

383

117

WILLIAM LEVIN, Shakespeare and Jonson a lesson to their successors, 1731

385

118

Jonson’s comedy obsolete, 1732

387

119

A proper reaction to Volpone, 1733

389

120

WILLIAM WARBURTON and LEWIS THEOBALD On Jonson, 1734

393

121

ALEXANDER POPE on Jonson’s inflated popular reputation, 1737

395

122

ALGERNON SIDNEY on Catiline, 1739

397

123

HENRY FIELDING on Jonson, 1740, 1742

401

124

CORBYN MORRIS, humours in Shakespeare and Jonson, 1744

405

125

DAVID GARRICK, the acting of Drugger and Macbeth, 1744

409

126

SARAH FIELDING, David Simple hears a critic on Shakespeare and Jonson, 1744

411

127

WILLIAM GUTHRIE, Jonson the Poussin of drama, 1747

413

128

Unsigned review of La Place’s Catiline, 1747

415

129

SAMUEL JOHNSON, Shakespeare and Jonson, 1747

419

xi

130

CHARLES MACKLIN, a forged pamphlet on Jonson, 1748

421

131

EDMUND BURKE, Jonson and true comedy, 1748

425

132

JOHN UPTON on Jonson, 1749

427

133

RICHARD HURD, on Catiline and on Shakespeare versus Jonson, 1749

431

134

THOMAS SEWARD on Jonson, Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher, 1750

433

135

WILLIAM GUTHRIE, Jonson and human nature, 1750

435

136

Garrick’s Every Man in his Humour revival, 1751

437

137

FRANCIS GENTLEMAN, Sejanus, 1751

441

138

BONNELL THORNTON, review of Epicoene, 1752

443

139

THEOPHILUS CIBBER and ROBERT SHIELLS, summary criticism of Jonson, 1753

445

140

RICHARD HURD, Every Man out of his Humour, The Alchemist, Volpone, 1753–7

447

141

ARTHUR MURPHY, essays in The Gray’s Inn Journal, 1754–86

451

142

DAVID HUME, Jonson’s rude art, 1754

453

143

SARAH FIELDING and JANE COLLIER, Jonson’s envy of Shakespeare, 1754

455

144

PETER WHALLEY’S edition of Jonson, 1756

459

145

RICHARD HURD, Jonson’s imitations, 1757

473

146

ARTHUR MURPHY, articles in The London Chronicle, 1757

477

147

THOMAS WILKES on Jonson and on Jonson actors of the day, 1759

481

148

EDWARD YOUNG, Jonson and the load of learning, 1759

483

149

CHARLES CHURCHILL, Jonson’s judgement, 1761

485

150

Garrick as Abel Drugger, 1762

487

151

HORACE WALPOLE on Jonson, 1762–76

489

152

SAMUEL ROGERS, Shakespeare and Jonson, 1763

491

153

DAVID ERSKINE BAKER On Jonson, 1764

493

154

HEINRICH WILHELM von GERSTENBERG on Jonson, 1765

497

155

JOHN BROWN, Bartholomew Fair revised, 1765

499

156

EDWARD CAPELL, Jonson’s borrowings, 1766

501

157

Jonson strong without passion, 1767

505

xii

158

JAMES BEATTIE, Jonson’s misuse of learning, 1769

507

159

ELIZABETH MONTAGUE, Jonson and Shakespeare, 1769, 1770

509

160

FRANCIS GENTLEMAN, Jonson a bad writer, 1770

511

161

CHARLES JENNER, Sir Charles Beville at The Alchemist, 1770

513

162

FRANCIS GENTLEMAN’S The Tobacconist, 1770–1

517

163

GEORGE COLMAN’S revival of Volpone, 1771

521

164

Doubts on Jonson and the old dramatists, 1772

525

165

Shakespeare and Jonson compared, 1772

529

166

GEORGE STEEVENS on Jonson, 1773–8

531

167

LORD CAMDEN, on reading Jonson, 1774

533

168

FRANCIS GENTLEMAN, notes on Jonson’s ode to Shakespeare, 1774

535

169

DAVID GARRICK on confidence tricks in The Alchemist, 1774

537

170

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG, Garrick’s Abel Drugger, 1775

539

171

GEORGE COLMAN’S Epicoene, 1776

541

172

Kitely preferred to Ford, 1778

547

173

THOMAS DAVIES on Jonson revivals, 1780

549

174

B.WALWYN, Falstaff and Bobadil, 1782

551

175

COLMAN’S Volpone revived, 1783

555

176

THOMAS DAVIES, observations on Jonson, 1783–4

559

177

GEORGE COLMAN, Jonson’s intentions in The Sad Shepherd, 1784

567

178

RICHARD CUMBERLAND on Jonson, 1786–8

569

179

HENRY SAMPSON WOODFALL, JUN., Jonson’s vain contention with Shakespeare, 1788

575

180

PHILIP NEVE on Jonson, 1789

577

181

LUDWIG TIECK on Shakespeare and Jonson, 1794

579

182

NATHAN DRAKE, Jonson’s inferior genius, 1798

583

BIBLIOGRAPHY

585

INDEX

599

Preface

This collection aims to include the most significant critical responses to Jonson that have survived from his own time and from the period up to 1800. In choosing what to reprint from the vast amount of material available I have concentrated on passages that pursue a line of argument or express a particular enthusiasm or dislike, and have generally passed over those that merely sum up the poet’s current reputation. Discussions of Jonson which were clearer when given with their context seemed especially appropriate; others, which were obviously important, yet could be adequately quoted in a phrase or a sentence, appear in the Introduction. The selections are more generous in the earlier periods, from which I have reprinted some fragmentary materials and some not unequivocally referring to Jonson. However, I have omitted items, like elements of some of the plays in the Poetomachia of early in the seventeenth century, which show Jonson’s influence rather than give a critical perspective on his work; and I have drawn the line at documents which retail literary gossip apparently at second hand, and in no coherent form, such as the references to Jonson in Hemminge’s poem from the early 1630s (see William Hemminge’s Elegy on Randolph’s Finger, ed. G.C.Moore-Smith (Stratford 1923), pp. 12, 17–18). I have made constant use of the edition of Jonson’s works by C.H.Herford and P. and E.Simpson, Ben Jonson (1925–52). Their collections of responses to Jonson’s work on stage in volume ix, and of documents comprising his ‘Literary Record’ in volume xi, have made the work for this collection much easier. The seventeenth-century allusions to Jonson printed in J.F.Bradley and J.Q.Adams (eds), The Jonson Allusion-Book (1922), and in volume ii of G.E.Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (1945) have also simplified the task greatly. I am grateful to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral, for permission to publish No. 26 from Canterbury Cathedral Literary Manuscript DIO; to the Bodleian Library, for permission to publish Nos 33, 36(g), 41, and 48 from MS Ashmole 38, No. 35 from MS Don. C. 24, and No. 73 from MS Clarendon 123; to the British Library, for permission to publish No. 31 from Harley MS 6057, Nos 36(f) and 37 from Harley MS 4955, and No. 50 from Additional MS 19255; to the Public Record Office, for permission to publish No. 36(e) from the Domestic State Papers, Charles I clv, no. 79, 1629; to the Oxford University Press, for permission to publish No. 30 from Ben Jonson, ed. C.H.Herford and P. and E. Simpson (1925–52), 11 vols, No. 43 from The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays, ed. L.A.Beaurline (1971), No. 65 from Samuel Butler, Prose Observations, ed. Hugh de Quehen (1979), No. 115 from Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men: Collected from Conversation, ed. James M.Osborn

xiv

(1966), 2 vols, and No. 170 from Lichtenberg’s Visits to England, trans. Margaret L.Mare and W.H.Quarrell (1938); to the Harvard University Press for permission to publish No. 169 from The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little, George M.Kahrl, and Phoebe de K.Wilson (1963), 3 vols, and to Unwin Hyman Limited, for permission to publish Nos 58, 63, 66, and 72 from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (1970–83), 11 vols. Translations from Latin and Greek were generously supplied by my colleagues Dr Rhona Beare, Dr Bernie Curran, Associate Professor Michael Ewans, and Professor Godfrey Tanner; I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Dr Curran. I am indebted for most useful correspondence to Dr Nicole Bonvalet-Mallet, of the University of Alberta, to Mrs E.M.Coleman of the Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and to Dr Bryan WardPerkins of the Library at Holkham Hall, Norfolk. Professor Ian Donaldson shared generously his expert knowledge of Jonson’s older critics; Professor Anne Barton offered many useful leads, and Dr G.W. Nicholls allowed me to consult his thesis on ‘Aspects of Stage Productions of Ben Jonson, 1660–76’ (St David’s College, Lampeter 1972). Dr C.S.Chubb kindly undertook a number of researches for me in the British Library. An Outside Studies Programme from the University of Newcastle, a grant from the Australian Research Grants Scheme, and a period at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University gave the time and the opportunities for travel needed for the project. In my own department, Professor D.L.Frost first asked me to collaborate on work on this volume, then when other matters demanded his time invited me to take it over altogether. As heads of department in the life of the project, both he and Professor J.F.Burrows gave me every material support possible. Our secretary, Mrs P.M.Hill, has given invaluable assistance throughout. I owe a particular debt to my parents for their acute and patient suggestions for improvements in the work in its final stages. My wife, my daughter, and latterly my younger son, have allowed me to be absent in the near and far places where the work was done. I am deeply grateful to all these individuals and institutions for their help with this book; I remain responsible for its errors and shortcomings. Three recent books, each with a great deal to say about topics central to this volume, and especially about Jonson’s campaign of self-promotion, his public career, and his relationship with Shakespeare, reached me after the submission of my manuscript and thus too late to take account of here: Timothy Murray’s Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987), Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare, and George E.Rowe’s Distinguishing Jonson: Imitation, Rivalry, and the Direction of a Dramatic Career (both published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London 1988). Together they suggest that a reconsideration of Jonson’s achievement through a study of his early reception is already well under way.

Note

The texts of the documents are from the first printed edition, and the place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated. The use of ‘u’ and ‘v’ has been regularized throughout, as has that of ‘i’ and ‘j’, with the exception of proper names in a Latin context. Contractions apart from ampersands have generally been expanded, and diereses omitted. Otherwise spelling and punctuation is uncorrected. Quotations from Jonson have been identified; for this purpose I have used for the plays, the prose, and the masques Ben Jonson, ed. C.H.Herford and P. and E.Simpson, (Oxford 1925–52), 11 vols, and for the poems, the edition by Ian Donaldson, Poems (Oxford 1975). References to Shakespeare are to The Tudor Shakespeare, ed. P.Alexander (1951). References to the works of other authors are to Oxford Standard Authors editions, unless otherwise stated. Translations from classical authors are (where possible) from Loeb editions, sometimes amended slightly. Details of performances between 1660 and 1800 are from The London Stage 1660– 1800, ed. William van Lennep, Emmett L. Avery, Arthur H.Scouten, George Winchester Stone, Jr, and Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale, Ill. 1965–8), 5 Parts in 11 vols. Biographical details are mostly from The Dictionary of National Biography (1908–9), 22 vols. Longer omissions in the texts of the documents are indicated by three asterisks. Footnotes in the original text, where included, are indicated by an asterisk, a dagger, and so on. The numbered footnotes are the editor’s.

Abbreviations

JONSON’S WORKS Alch. BF Cat. Conv. Dr. D. is A. Disc. EMI EMO Epig. Hym. Poet. Queens S. of N. Songs SW Und. U.V. Volp.

The Alchemist Bartholomew Fair Catiline Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden The Devil is an Ass Timber, or Discoveries Every Man in his Humour (1616 version) Every Man out of his Humour Epigrams Hymenaei Poetaster The Masque of Queens The Staple of News Songs and Poems from the Plays and Masques (in Jonson, Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford 1975)) Epicoene, or The Silent Woman The Underwood Ungathered Verse Volpone OTHER WORKS

H&S LS

OED

Ben Jonson, ed. C.H.Herford and P. and E. Simpson (Oxford 1925–52), 11 vols. The London Stage 1660–1800, ed. William van Lennep, Emmett L.Avery, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone, Jr, and Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale, Ill. 1965–8), 5 Parts in 11 vols. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford 1933), 12 vols.

Introduction

I Jonson’s rise to the heights of literary reputation in his own time was extraordinary, and so was his fall from grace a century later. He set out to establish for the first time in England a literary canon, and to install himself at its centre. The system was to be based on the principles of scholarly industry, careful construction, observance of the rules, and the imitation of the ancients. By extraordinary efforts of self-promotion, as well as by a series of innovative and carefully finished works, he succeeded, and by the middle of his career his authority in literary matters was widely recognized. At his death in 1637 he was celebrated as the founder and chief representative of an English literary culture fit to rival that of the ancients. Remarkably, something like this authority was maintained through the seventeenth century; but in the eighteenth century his works were dislodged from their position at the centre of the canon to become a cautionary tale, a striking illustration of a misjudged approach to creative effort. The causes of this dramatic change lie partly in shifts in values. Jonson had identified himself so firmly with the neo-classic principles of labour and critical judgement that when those principles lost favour, he was left stranded on the high ground he had himself chosen. But complicating the story was the fact of Shakespeare. However successful in persuading others of the overwhelming importance of his own work and his own artistic principles, Jonson was himself acutely aware of Shakespeare as a great rival and as a powerful instance of a different set of artistic principles from his own. As Jonson’s domination over the official literary scene lessened after his death, Shakespeare (who had died in 1616) emerged, first as the natural opposite to Jonson in approaches to composition, his native wit contrasted with Jonson’s learning, his casual inspiration compared with Jonson’s art of calculation and exactness. Then in the eighteenth century an increasing sympathy for that native wit and inspiration, coupled with the movement to elevate Shakespeare, pushed Jonson into an irretrievable inferiority. To lower Jonson was to raise Shakespeare; armed with the evidence (and with various legends) of Jonson’s enmity towards Shakespeare, Jonson’s attackers fixed an image of Jonson’s character as malignantly envious, and denounced his works as laboured and dull. Jonson’s supporters early in the next century rescued his character from the more extreme fictions, but were hardly able to revive interest in his works. In the nineteenth century reviewers mostly contented themselves with assuring readers that there really

2 BEN JONSON

was little reason to labour through Jonson’s works, except to discover the occasional charming lyric. A great deal has been done since then to restore Jonson’s reputation, though beyond the world of the specialist he is hardly less in Shakespeare’s shadow today than he was in the nineteenth century. This fact gives the present collection of documents a special interest, aside from the insights the early critics have to offer on Jonson’s work. The modern reader cannot help seeing all the writers of the English literary Renaissance from a Shakespearean perspective. Shakespeare’s works, and the principles we see as informing those works, dominate our view of the period. But the perspective of the documents preserved from Jonson’s own century, in particular, is quite different. They allow us to see Jonson as the sun of a Jonsonian literary universe, as he was for his contemporaries and for his immediate posterity; and the documents from the next century allow us to see him, as he was viewed then, as the chief obstacle in the struggle to elevate Shakespeare as the national poet, and thus to fashion the Shakespearean universe we all now inhabit. II The record of Jonson’s reception before 1600 presents no clear pattern. Francis Meres lists him among England’s leading trage-dians, though no Jonson tragedies from this period survive.1 Another source (No. 1, below) also praises his tragedies, but gives to John Marston the title of the English Horace that Jonson later claimed for himself. On Jonsonian comedy, there is only Thomas Nashe’s passing reference to the ‘witty’ play The Case is Altered.2 Early in the next century, however, Jonson attained a definite celebrity, and the evidence of his reception takes on a distinct pattern. Every Man in his Humour (acted 1598) and the ‘Comicall Satyre’ Every Man out of his Humour (acted 1599) aroused controversy. The latter play in particular was seen as part of the current wave of satirical writings, and attacked as excessive, vicious, and disruptive.3 Nicholas Breton in No. 5, for instance, depicts Jonson as pursuing an impossible, arrogant quest for reform in the plays. Most importantly, from Jonson’s point of view, they were noticed as strikingly new. He had by this time gained a reputation as a creator of characters, but his plays were also seen as entering into a dangerously direct relationship to real life. He was accused of putting ‘humours’ from real life onto the stage, and of satirizing his contemporaries in his characters. This last charge had brought him to the attention of the authorities as early as 1597, when he was investigated by the Privy Council for his part in the play The Isle of Dogs.4 Jonson’s answer, made in the prologue to Every Man out of his Humour, and in the ‘apologeticall Dialogue’ given at the end of Poetaster (No. 6(c)), was to deny that there was any personal satire in his plays, quoting the classical formula that true comedy attacks vices but spares individuals. The response to the humours comedies was soon caught up in what Dekker called the ‘Poetomachia’ —the wider quarrel between Jonson on one side and Marston and Dekker on the other which was acted out in a number of satirical plays in the early years of the century.5 In the Conversations reported by Drummond, Jonson says his disagreement with Marston had begun when Marston ‘represented him in the stage’.6 In the ‘apologeticall Dialogue’ of 1601 Jonson says the attacks on him have been continuing for three years, which gives some reason for thinking that the earliest suggested Marston caricature of Jonson, Chrisoganus in Histrio-Mastix (1599), is the one Jonson is referring to. Against this

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 3

chronology for the quarrel is Dekker’s reference in the ‘Address to the World’ prefixed to Satiromastix (No. 7(a), 1601–2) to the quarrels having begun ‘recently’. The Poetomachia is represented in this collection by Satiromastix and by Jonson’s own Poetaster, they offer the clearest perspectives on the dispute about Jonson’s literary claims. The other plays of this time which have been identified as including attacks on Jonson are more ambiguous. Chrisoganus in Histrio-Mastix, for instance, is clearly an admirable figure, and a reference to ‘Ramnusias whippe’ connects him to W.Kinsayder, Marston’s own railing satirist figure, who appears at the beginning of The Scourge of Villainie bearing the same device.7 Like Lampatho Doria in Marston’s What You Will (1601) —Lampatho is actually called a ‘don Kinsayder’– Chrisoganus is better seen as a variant on the scholar-hero (named variously Asper, Crites, Macilente, and Horace) who was Jonson’s contribution to the composite figure of the contemporary satirist. The explicitly satirized Brabant Signior of Marston’s Jacke Drums Entertainment (1600), on the other hand, is a character who cannot be exclusively a caricature of Jonson-he is wealthy bourgeois with no literary aspirations—though the fact that he is a collector of acquaintances with humours, and an arrogant detractor of contemporary poets, suggests he may reflect something of the contemporary response to Jonson. In Poetaster Jonson presents himself as the Roman poet Horace, and has Virgil defend Horace-Jonson by declaring that, for all his carping critics, he will never really suffer debasement because he possesses ‘a true, and perfect merit’. This quality is an ideal property of the spirit rather than one measured by literary achievement. It is a talisman for an exclusive group of poets against their critics and it creates a charmed circle around them. In the play the Emperor Augustus, who had asked Horace and others to give their judgements on Virgil, sets his seal on the circle by acknowledging that in recognizing Virgil’s merit they have proved their own (5.1.139–41). Jonson’s implication is that he has discovered the true literary values, and by that discovery has attained ‘a true, and perfect merit’, has qualified himself as a classic artist and even as a literary dictator. It is as if authority has been created not by artistic achievement but by judgement, enacted in critical pronouncements and in plays like Poetaster. There was a circular argument at the heart of the theory: the merit of the classic poet cannot be challenged because good judgement consists precisely in recognizing that same merit.8 This circularity is clearest in Poetaster and in other statements from Jonson’s early career, since they came at a time when his achievements—the early comedies and tragedies, the humours plays, Cynthia’s Revels, and Poetaster itself—could scarcely form the basis for his authority. Thomas Dekker presents his own version of Horace-Jonson in his play Satiromastix (No. 7, acted 1601). He is not the noble-minded injured poet of Poetaster but a spiteful satirist who lashes out at friends and patrons as well as at foes. He claims his motive is the love of virtue but really he is driven by pride and scorn. The argument that Horace-Jonson’s critics are only blind or envious is specifically answered: they are angry not for these reasons but because they will not accept being pilloried in his writings when they see he is made of the same clay as themselves, and when they know the source of the learning he parades to disguise his sordid materials. What right, anyway, does he have to call himself Horace? The name is usurped: Jonson is a counterfeit, a ‘selfe-creating Horace’. Like one of Jonson’s own characters presented with a confidence trick, Dekker declares that he will not be gulled by Jonson’s self-serving theory of the classic poet. Satiromastix was aimed at dismantling the theory that Jonson was erecting around himself; to Dekker it seemed that it was nothing more than shameless self-promotion. Yet Satiromastix is itself a tribute to Jonson’s success, in that it registers discomfort at the

4 BEN JONSON

arrival of a new phenomenon; and Jonson himself had answers for its objections, which he had already given in Poetaster. To the accusation that he was commending himself, there was his merit; to the accusation that he used translated material in his plays, there was the ancient tradition that translating was as meritorious as writing afresh; and to the accusation that his denunciations were too harsh, there was the retort that asperity is to be expected in a satirist. In the context of an English stage generally perceived as unworthy of serious attention, fed by makeshift, sensational, or merely trifling plays, the figure of the classic poet that Jonson constructed for himself could be seen as innovator and as reformer. His rigorously constructed plays, his well-differentiated characters, the dense and carefully weighed language he gave them, all supported the idea that his was a learned drama which would bring some standards at last to the theatre of his day. He constructed a theory in the prefaces, prologues, and epilogues which accompanied the plays, and within the plays in choruses and in his poet-characters, that put his own style of composition at the centre of the literary system. The prologue to Cynthia’s Revels (No. 3) contains the chief elements of his campaign: Jonson the self-styled classic poet appeals to the judgement of the few rather than to the applause of the multitude; he underlines his claims to originality; and he invokes the neo-classical slogans of ‘words above action’, ‘matter above words’. In the rest of the first decade of the seventeenth century, Jonson’s terminology and Jonson’s estimate of himself came to be widely accepted. In the poems commending Volpone appended to the published version of the play his supporters make the widest of claims for his achievements. Edmund Bolton puts them in a European perspective, imagining that those who do not know English grieve because they cannot read Jonson (No. 19(c)). John Donne takes up the paradox of Jonson as a living classic, declaring that Jonson’s works are born ancient (No. 19(d)). A change appears about this time in Jonson’s presentation of himself as a classic artist. In the early part of his career, when he was establishing himself as a writer of humours comedies and as the English Horace, his emphasis is positive, stressing the reforming and innovative aspects of his drama. In 1605, in his Volpone prologue (No. 19(a)), Jonson defines his allegiance to classicism negatively, as an act of opposition to contemporary popular culture. Jonson takes pride in refusing to give the audience the vulgar entertainment it wants; its distaste for his offerings is itself a guarantee of quality. The failure of Sejanus on stage in 1605 was the key event in this development: it came to be a signal instance of the poor discrimination of the popular audience and a trigger for indignation at the rejection of a great poet. Chapman’s poem on Sejanus (No. 16(b)) makes Jonson a brave adventurer on the stormy sea of the multitude; Edmund Bolton (No. 16(f)) angrily denies that there is any significance in the audience’s rejection of the play. Jonson was becoming celebrated for his theatrical failures: in 1611 Catiline also suffered at the hands of the audience; Francis Beaumont, acknowledging the fact, suggested posterity as the play’s proper audience (No. 23 (c)). John Webster, in his preface to The White Devil —without mentioning Sejanus or Catiline—adopts Jonson’s terms for the classical play in defending his own decision not to make his play on the Jonsonian model. He cites as a well-known truth the incapacity of the multitude to appreciate plays of this kind.9 By about 1609, however, Jonson had achieved a fame beyond the noisy world of the stage. Loyal patrons among the nobility and well-paid employment as masque-writer to the court gave him a measure of independence from the public theatre. Jonson was interested in the tradition of the poet laureate, as John Selden noted (No. 24, headnote); he was called by the title as early as 1605 (No. 15), though the office of laureate was

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 5

created after his time.10 From 1612 the record is of a steady stream of writers acknowledging Jonson’s canonical status, talking confidently already of an appreciative posterity. ‘Ages shall pay’ their tribute of praise, George Lucy says in 1612, ‘yet still must owe’. For Robert Burton in a note to the 1624 Anatomy of Melancholy Jonson is the ‘ArchPoet’.11 Hostile critics in this period were pretty well silenced, though there were protests from the enemies Jonson had made, like Inigo Jones, whose poem on Jonson from 1619 (No. 31) expresses a strong distaste for Jonson’s public personality. In 1629 Jonson’s romantic comedy The New Inn failed on stage; Jonson circulated an ‘Ode to Himself’ (No. 36(b)) declaring angrily that the play was simply too good for its audience. The ‘Ode’ caused a controversy as heated as the one over Poetaster. If in the middle period (from 1604 to the end of the 1620s) a consensus acknowledged Jonson as the academic pillar of the English state—too pedantic for some tastes, but with the achievement hardly ever questioned—the period from 1629 to Jonson’s death was one of a strong divergence of opinion. For his defenders, the New Inn débâcle and Jonson’s angry defence of the play in his ‘Ode to Himself’ changed nothing: Jonson was a monument, a colossus, and already immortal (No. 35, from 1629, even urges him to die to perfect his achievement). For his supporters he was, in James Shirley’s words, ‘our acknowledg’d Master’.12 But the intemperate tone of Jonson’s ‘Ode’ brought his opponents out into the open, or at least into the historical record. They attacked Jonson’s presumption that his works must all bear equally the stamp of greatness. And once the merit of one of the works of the classic poet was called into question, his defence against the charge of boastfulness was weakened. In the 1630s, as at the beginning of the century, there were those who were prepared to say that the emperor had no clothes. For Owen Felltham in No. 36(d) Jonson is simply ridiculous as a self-praiser; to Felltham it is not so obvious that The New Inn is better than the Pericles Jonson had so angrily dismissed in his ‘Ode’. Some of Jonson’s critics, like the anonymous author of No. 36(g), were even prepared to doubt Jonson’s judgement. Sir John Suckling declares that he cannot see Jonson’s vaunted merit—he finds him obscure, his artistic choices arbitrary—and it follows that Jonson’s selfpromotion must be only presumption (No. 43). Suckling was an admirer of Shakespeare as well as a sceptic about the merits of Jonson, but he does not (as it happens) put the two authors together in a comparison. But elsewhere Jonson and Shakespeare begin to appear together, by themselves or in a short list of other dramatists, in the 1630s. In these lists, as G.E.Bentley points out, Jonson is often distinguished for his classical virtues— learning, accuracy—but there is no ‘clear consensus’, in Bentley’s phrase, in the reasons for Shakespeare being singled out.13 It seems, then, that it was not common in Jonson’s lifetime to contrast him systematically with Shakespeare. However, there were some pioneers. Milton’s reference in ‘On Shakespeare. 1630’ to the ‘slow-endeavoring art’ shamed by Shakespeare’s ‘easy numbers’ may allude to Jonson. Certainly in ‘L’Allegro’ (1632) Milton is among the earliest to pair the two playwrights as the representatives of art and nature (‘If Jonson’s learned sock be on, /Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child/ Warble his woodnotes wild’). Leonard Digges’s poem on Shakespeare’s popularity in the theatre as against the lean pickings from Jonson performances (No. 38) seems to have been written for the 1632 Shakespeare Folio; if so, Digges is the first committed partisan we know of for Shakespeare against Jonson. The reaction immediately after Jonson’s death in 1637 was to reaffirm the literary authority which had been questioned in the years after 1629. To Henry Coventry, one of

6 BEN JONSON

the elegists in the volume of verses marking Jonson’s death, Father Ben’s opponents were nothing less than ‘Parricides in verse’. The volume appeared in 1638, with the title Jonsonus Virbius (the reference is to Diana’s follower Hippolytus, renamed Virbius after he was revived by Aesculapius). No English writer since Sidney had been honoured in this way; to mark Shakespeare’s death in 1616 there had been, so far as we know, only the elegy by William Basse.14 It is in reading Jonsonus Virbius that the difference between a Shakespearean and a Jonsonian universe is clearest: indeed, to the modern reader, the chief reward offered by this undistinguished collection of hyper bole and stock metaphor is the revelation of something like an alternative literary history, an English literary Renaissance without Shakespeare. According to the elegists, it is Jonson who has brought English culture, and the English language, from obscurity and crudity to one that can match the culture of the ancients. They are divided as to whether the death of Jonson means the death of poetry, or will allow the survival of a literature living off his legacy, but they are unanimous in allowing him no rivals at the pinnacle of achievement in English literature. Even allowing for the exaggeration inseparable from tributes of this kind, the collection indicates a strikingly unfamiliar perspective on the literary achievements of the period. Jonson is praised in the very terms we are used to hearing applied to Shakespeare’s works and influence. Edmund Waller, for instance, pictures Jonson as an elusive, protean writer, disappearing from view as he creates different characters and in different genres (No. 49(f)). Richard West says in his elegy that in the future foreigners will throng to England to hear the English speak the tongue of Jonson (No. 49(1)). To these readers, the ghost of Sylla from Catiline and Carlo Buffone from Every Man out of his Humour are apparently as familiar as Hamlet and Falstaff are to later generations. When Shakespeare appears here, it is often to be disparaged: one of the elegists wonders scornfully if Jonson’s critics will list among his faults his command of Latin, which ‘your Shakespeare’ could scarcely understand (No. 49(n)). Shakespeare and Beaumont may be entertaining, but it is Jonson who is worthy of study (No. 49(1)). Jonsonus Virbius is a signal confirmation of Jonson’s lifelong campaign on his own behalf. He had constructed the Pantheon the elegies describe, and had (against some strenuous opposition) put his own bust in the central niche; he had created a canon and simultaneously canonized his own work, to become a classic in his own lifetime. III Jonson criticism in the period from his death to the end of the seventeenth century is dominated by John Dryden. Dryden’s interest in Jonson was close and lifelong: his first reference to Jonson is in the prologue to The Wild Gallant of 1663, and his last in the prologue to Fables Ancient and Modern, which appeared in 1700, the year of his death. He wrote the most important critical treatment of Jonson in the period—Jonson is the English dramatist singled out for extended analysis in his Essay of Dramatique Poesie of 1667 —and the frequency of Dryden’s references suggest that Jonson was never far from his mind. Dryden was the leader in a debate on the merits of Jonson which continued into the 1690s. When others in the period wrote on Jonson it was very often to answer Dryden’s criticisms: Shadwell is the obvious example, but the same is true of Richard Flecknoe, Edward Howard, and Gerald Langbaine. Dryden’s response to Jonson was complicated, and it varied according to the issue at hand: his great predecessor was at times an obstacle,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 7

at others a useful ally. In defending English drama against the French, for instance, Jonson’s prestige was an asset; in making room for the drama of his own day, however, Dryden was impelled to qualify his praise for Jonson and for the other dramatists of the era before the Civil War in a way that seemed to Jonson’s supporters to be heresy. Jonson’s achievement had been to establish an organized and official set of values among the privileged opinion-makers of English culture. After his death that set of values —together with the doctrine of Jonson as a classic poet—remained largely coherent and available to those who wished to berate the fripperies and follies of the contemporary stage. In the hands of someone like Jeremy Collier right at the end of the century (No. 97) it was a standard to flourish against the absurdities and immorality even of the legitimate theatre of the day. For the Jonson supporters, the group Aphra Behn in No. 83 labels a ‘sect’, Jonson’s prestige was intact with no qualification and no limitation: in John Oldham’s eulogy (No. 87) his achievement is still vast beyond comprehension, still unquestionably a classic for all time. In the period immediately following his death in 1637, Jonson most often appears as a visitor from the Shades. Jonson as departed spirit and Jonson as satirist, literary reformer, and judge made an irresistible combination. One of the writers of the time pictures Jonson in the Shades with the ancient poets quaking at the prospect of his judgement on them (No. 52(a)); another has him starting a fight in Elysium by declaring himself the best of the English poets.15 He is also depicted returning to this world to put fear into the hearts of his successors on the English stage, warning audiences not to repeat the mistakes of the past by condemning his plays (No. 74) or by encouraging farces and other trifling stage diversions.16 Some of the individual acts of defiance and rhetorical flourishes Jonson had made in the character of the classic poet lived on into this period, too. They were taken up and varied for the writers’ own purposes. Jonson had called his folio volume of plays and poems his Workes, thus suggesting they belonged with the writings of the divines and of the ancients. He was the first English dramatist to make this claim: the gesture was hotly debated in his own time, and it provided a formula which appealed to later writers. On the one hand, ‘works’ contrasted to ‘plays’ suggested high art as against mere stage entertainment. Suckling has Jonson use it in this way in ‘A Session of the Poets’ (No. 45). On the other hand, ‘work’ versus ‘play’ was used to suggest laborious effort in creation as opposed to masterful ease.17 The epilogue to Poetaster had declared of its play, ‘By (–) ’tis good, and if you lik’t, you may.’ There were references to this challenge by Jonson’s contemporaries, and more from his successors: a written version is actually fed to a character in Lewis Sharpe’s play The Noble Stranger (1640), as a quick (and, as it proves, successful) way of producing ‘a confident Poeticall wit’. Elsewhere Jonson’s challenge is cited with varying emphasis, as an example of confidence admirable or enviable in a poet.18 References like these demonstrate the posthumous vitality of Jonson’s persona as classic poet. He continued to be the outstanding instance of the unashamed, self-appointed literary dictator. But in this period Jonson had also very often to take his place in a group of writers—most often with Shakespeare and Fletcher or Beaumont and Fletcher, as the ‘Triumvirate of wit’.19 Comparison was the habit of the age; in discussing one writer, critics frequently turned to another or to several others to balance complementary talents and achievements against each other. Asked to give an opinion on Jonson in Dryden’s Essay (Of Dramatique Poesie, 1667, No. 67), Neander says he must first deal with Shakespeare and Fletcher, Jonson’s ‘rivalls in Poesie’. Most of the summary comparisons

8 BEN JONSON

between the triumvirate, like Richard Flecknoe’s in No. 62, gave Fletcher Wit, Shakespeare Nature, and Jonson Art and Judgement. The terms of the comparison between Shakespeare and Jonson in particular—Nature versus Art, native genius versus learning—had earlier given Jonson’s side the preference. Samuel Butler, writing his prose observations late in the 1660s, makes Jonson an example of how enduring things are achieved by the reliable means of art, while Shakespeare’s example shows how the chancy inspirations of nature, though easier, in fact produce less lasting results (No. 65). But there are signs of an alternative view: Thomas Fuller in No. 61 pictures Jonson as a slow, high-built Spanish galleon, Shakespeare as a mobile English man-of-war. Shakespeare is here the true native, anticipating the shift in the next century by which Jonson was to lose his position as the centrepiece of a proudly English classicism to a still more aboriginal Shakespeare. Aphra Behn introduces a variation on the conventional opposition of learned Jonson to natural Shakespeare by declaring that her own womanly lack of learning may be an advantage in a playwright. ‘We all well know’, she says in a 1673 preface (No. 83), that Shakespeare’s works have pleased the public better than Jonson’s, though Shakespeare was the less learned of the two. In this period Jonson’s own comments on Shakespeare are not the inflammatory material they later became. Edward Howard in an essay of 1673 mentions with calm approval Jonson’s wish that Shakespeare had blotted out more lines.20 There are references, though, to severe remarks mixed with the praise in the ‘Ode’ to the memory of Shakespeare, to be expected from the ‘magisterial’ Jonson.21 Dryden compared the ‘Ode’ to Rochester’s description of Buckhurst as ‘The best good Man, with the worst natur’d Muse’ —a description Dryden calls an ‘Insolent, Sparing, and Invidious Panegyrick’.22 Dryden had been indignant, too, about Jonson’s severity on Shakespeare for breaking the unity of place in his plays.23 As in most other topics of Jonson criticism, it is Dryden in this period who has the most telling comments to make on the comparison between Jonson and Shakespeare. In his 1667 Essay he is even-handed—Shakespeare is the English Homer, and Jonson has equal honours as the English Virgil—though Dryden declares his personal preference for Shakespeare. Later in 1667 Dryden was more outspoken: in his prologue to the revived Tempest (No. 68) the copiously original Shakespeare is unequivocally monarch over the industrious but derivative Jonson. Dryden pictures the latter creeping below the vast branching tree of Shakespeare gathering what fallen fruits he can. It is Jonson, however, who has pride of place in Dryden’s Essay as the representative of the old English drama. Epicoene is singled out as ‘the pattern of a perfect Play’, and its technical artistry is analysed in an extended set-piece. Dryden discusses not only where Jonson has observed the unities, and where he has failed to do so—Catiline, for instance, breaks the unity of place, and Volpone the unity of action—but also such details as Jonson’s skilful liaison des scènes, his keeping one or more characters on stage after a scene to link it to the next.24 Dryden declares Jonson to be the equal of the French in regularity, and their superior in variety. Jonson’s energetic thoroughness as an artist, the measured care of his composition, offer powerful assistance in establishing the claims of English drama against its French rival. At exactly this period (1666–7) a Frenchman, Saint-Evremond, was conceding the point, declaring Jonson’s deeply considered, loosely unified comedy a model for the French (No. 64). Yet in another context, that of the ancient English tradition versus the new, Jonson’s prestige is an obstacle to Dryden. Here he focuses on humours comedy to suggest that its limitations allow room for improvement, as shown by the witty comedy of his own day.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 9

Dryden’s attitude to Jonson throughout his career is informed by his sense of history. He knows, first of all, that writers belong to their times: to survive, after all, they have to please their immediate audiences. It may be, he argues, that this fact offers an opportunity; if wit and language are now more refined than in the times of the old dramatists, the drama may be correspondingly improved (No. 82(b)). But Dryden is also acutely aware of his situation in literary history as following a great generation of poets, a generation especially distinct because of the gap of the Commonwealth years. The triumvirate, he says in the Essay, is ‘honour’d, and almost ador’d by us, as they deserve’; but they leave for the present a wasted inheritance; their special advantage was to come first, and they have taken the freshness from almost every humour, every character, every plot. Only the scantiness of their drama in rhymed verse leaves an opportunity for the present generation to excel them in that form. Early in his career Dryden seemed sanguine about the possibility of equalling or bettering these predecessors; in the 1690s, however, he writes resignedly of ‘these Inferiour Times’.25 Whatever improvements there may have been in the art of versification, ‘in the Drama we have not arriv’d to the pitch of Shakespear and Ben Johnson’.26 Only Congreve’s arrival on the scene gives hope that Fletcher, Jonson, and Shakespeare— ‘the Gyant Race, before the Flood’ —have been matched at last (No. 93). Here Dryden mentions Shakespeare and Fletcher as well as Jonson; but it was Jonson that Dryden had singled out in the Essay as the chief representative of his predecessors in the great age of English drama, and it was Jonson in particular that supporters of the preRestoration poets were prompted to defend. Dryden qualifies his praise of Jonson carefully in the Essay—he says, for example, that ‘One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it’;27 to some in the period this was scandalously irreverent. As the controversy continued, Dryden became progres-sively more outspoken on Jonson’s shortcomings.28 He pursued other objections: in a prologue from 1667 (No. 68) Jonson is a plagiarist, even if a lordly one; in a 1672 epilogue Dryden argues that Jonson’s humours comedy suited his times, but the times were ‘coarse’ and the comedy was ‘low’ (No. 82(b)). Defending his epilogue in No. 82(c), he argues that language has become more accurate since Jonson’s day, so that the solecisms he lists in Catiline and Every Man out of his Humour would not be tolerated now. Nevertheless, Dryden refused to accept the accusation that he was a doctrinaire ‘Detractor’ from his poetic predecessors,29 and it is worth remembering that in other contexts he could invoke Jonson as a precedent. Involved in a controversy with Elkanah Settle in 1674, he cites Jonson’s chastising of Dekker in Poetaster as a model for his attack on his opponent.30 Settle was enraged to find him ‘strutting, and impudently comparing himself to Ben Johnson’.31 Dryden was determined not to be a Jonson idolater—there should be no ‘ipse dixit’ in poetry, any more than in philosophy (No. 76) —and as a result was branded an iconoclast by the party for the old poets. He resisted the label, protested that he revered his predecessors and in particular declared that ‘I know I honour Ben Johnson more than my little Critiques, because without vanity I may own, I understand him better’.32 He accused his opponents of leaping to the old poets’ defence not out of genuine admiration for them but as a means of belittling the writers of the present and establishing their own domination: ‘By a seeming veneration to our Fathers, they wou’d thrust out us their Lawful Issue, and Govern us themselves, under a specious pretence of Reformation.’33 For his enemies, however, Dryden could only be regarded as a backslider in the cult of Jonson; the indignation at his lukewarm praise lasted throughout the century. Richard

10 BEN JONSON

Flecknoe in 1671 asserted, against Dryden, that the old poets would be equally preeminent if they wrote in the present (No. 75); Rochester in 1675 or 1676 protested that Dryden ‘find[s] ev’n Johnson dull’.34 In 1691 Langbaine was still defending Jonson, Shakespeare and Fletcher from Dryden’s charges (No. 90(a)). Thomas Shadwell was the loudest in declaring himself of the Jonson party. For Shadwell, Jonson is the one dramatist all others should imitate; it was insolence in Dryden to think that humours comedy could be written without wit, that wit in comedy is all to be found in witty repartee (No. 70). Shadwell invokes Jonson’s authority incessantly. Even when he writes an entertainment with spectacle, dancing, and music, like Psyche, he disarms criticism of what is clearly a departure from Jonsonian standards by saying that after all he would rather have written one scene of a comedy like Jonson’s than all the musical entertainments ever written.35 In 1676 he pointedly takes comfort in the fact that the enemies of his own humours plays also damn all Jonson’s.36 In this controversy Dryden’s superiority is not that his critical judgements seem more accurate than those of his opponents. The long list of the faults of Catiline in No. 82(c) now seems beside the point, and his prediction in the Essay and elsewhere that it was rhymed verse that would give his own generation the opportunity to excel the pre-Restoration poets was not fulfilled. Rather Dryden is distinguished from his opponents by his evident impulse towards fairness in the assessment of a work or an author, an impulse to resist the immediate pressures of a controversy. He begs the reader’s pardon for his criticisms of Jonson’s language, and declares his attack to be an unfortunate but necessary act of war: ‘I live in an age where my least faults are severely censur’d: and…I have no way left to extenuate my failings but my showing as great in those whom we admire’ (No. 82(c)). In Mac Flecknoe, his poetic satire on Shadwell (No. 86), Dryden puts to good use his awareness that Jonson’s work, and Jonson as a literary figure, are larger than the immediate purposes they serve for his partisans and his critics. Dryden prises from Shadwell’s grasp the very Jonson who had been Shadwell’s shield from his critics. The persona who speaks the poem, the much lampooned Richard Flecknoe, warns his ‘son’ Shadwell against claiming any kinship with Jonson, whose qualities of ‘Nature’, ‘Art’, ‘Wit or Learning’ have no place in Shadwell’s work or Flecknoe’s family.37 If Shadwell was the loudest in declaring his discipleship of Jonson, Edward Howard was the Jonson supporter most aware that he was in ‘a party on the side of our former poets’. The phrase is from his preface to The Womens Conquest (No. 78), which he suggests is his own ‘Essay on dramatique poesy’. It turns to Jonson at almost every stage of the discussion, for precept or example. He answers Dryden’s argument on ‘low’ drama, arguing that servants and maids are admissible in comedy if—as in The Alchemist—they are ‘essential characters’. Where Dryden in his Essay wishes to suggest that humour characters are simply observed from real life—that there was a real original for the character Morose, for instance—Howard argues for ‘morose’ characters as ‘extravagancies’, instances of justifiable poetic licence (No. 79).38 Howard calls the Jonson supporters a ‘party’, and Aphra Behn had called them a ‘sect’, in her view sustained more by affectation than by genuine enjoyment (No. 83). For all the objections of Dryden and others, there were those in the second half of the seventeenth century for whom Jonson remained absolutely central to the literary system. For Thomas Berney in 1652 Jonson was its sun;39 for Howard in 1689 other dramatists are like planets, ‘Rambling to find their Centre near his Sphere’ (No. 89(b)). In John Oldham’s elaborate tribute, published in 1678, it seems that nothing has changed from the unbounded eulogies of Jonsonus Virbius: Jonson brought nothing less than Form to the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 11

Chaos of English literature, he is nature and art, and so on for thirteen leisurely stanzas (No. 87). The evidence for the reputation of Jonson’s individual works in this period shows variations within a broadly stable pattern. For many, like Jasper Mayne in a sermon of 1647, Volpone was Jonson’s best comedy:40 for others, like Dryden, the episode of Sir Pol and the tortoiseshell told against Volpone and left The Alchemist as Jonson’s supreme achievement in the form (No. 88). As Howell puts it in No. 42(a), Jonson had his poetic inspiration in varying degrees: he was ‘madder’ when he wrote The Alchemist, ‘stark mad’ when he wrote Sejanus, not so mad when he wrote the epigrams and The Magnetic Lady. All the same, Jonson was established as the greatest of English epigrammatists, as Robert Heath declared in a poem of 1650.41 Of the remaining comedies, Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair were especially familiar to audiences from Restoration productions. Epicoene Dryden praises in his Essay; Pepys loved Bartholomew Fair, preferred it without its puppet show, and was shocked to see its satire of the Puritans on stage so soon after the end of Commonwealth (Nos 58(b), 58(c), 63(a), 72(a)). Catiline was best known for having been hissed off the stage,42 and its 1668 revival confirmed its reputation as a tragedy best appreciated in the study—even the elaborate costumes and scenery of the production failed to save it, as Samuel Pepys recorded (No. 72(c)).43 Sejanus fared better, since one writer reported that he was one of those that hissed it off at first, ‘yet after sate it out, not only patiantly, but with content, & admiration’;44 Fuller in 1662 says much the same thing in noting that the play took ‘not so well at the first stroke as at the rebound’ (No. 61). Edward Phillips in 1675 is unusual in finding in the tragedies something ‘artificial and inflate’ (No. 85). In the last decades of the seventeenth century a number of comments on Jonson suggest a new spirit of severity in criticism, In his Essay, Dryden had judged Jonson by neoclassical rules borrowed from the French, and in most respects he passes the test with honour. In the 1680s and 1690s writers remark on Jonson’s infringe-ments of the rules: de Muralt in France objects to the episode of the tortoiseshell in Volpone (No. 94), as Dryden had in No. 88; even Nahum Tate rejects it as ‘undiverting’ in praising Jonson as otherwise a great farceur (No. 92). For an earlier generation Jonson’s work was the triumphant exception to the absurdities of the Elizabethan playwrights, but for Thomas Rymer, writing in 1692, Jonson writes irregularly like his contemporaries, with too much translation and too many interludes to please the crowd (No. 91). John Dennis in 1695 objects to the ridiculing of Corbaccio in Volpone for defects he cannot help, and finds Morose in Epicoene a characterization fit only for farce (No. 96(a), 96(b)). By the end of the century, then, there were a number of stock objections to Jonson. Tom Brown in 1688 offers a convenient summary: there is his ‘affected Style, his dull way of making Love, his Thefts and mean Characters’.45 Most of them derived directly or indirectly from Dryden’s campaign to put Jonson into perspective, and it is to this campaign that we owe the tradition of close analysis of Jonson in the period, which added to the eulogies of Jonson as composite literary figure the consideration of specific issues, characters, and plots. For all this, Jonson’s broad critical fortunes from his death up to the end of the seventeenth century reflect a remarkable continuing success. Judged by modern assessments of literary importance, at least, he had powerful competitors among his contemporaries: there was Shakespeare, most obviously, but there was also the long tradition of dramatic achievement from Marlowe to Webster. Among that group Jonson, for the seventeenth century, stood out. He had vocal admirers throughout the period; his

12 BEN JONSON

name was constantly invoked; his work was as central to a discussion of English comedy in the 1690s as it had been in the 1630s. There was a Shakespeare party—Dryden was one of its leaders—but its work was only beginning. The force of Shakespeare’s example was in the next century to turn the terms on which Jonson had established his supremacy on their heads. Jonson had made himself the representative poet of deliberate art, of unremitting labour, of judgement; and had made those qualities supreme over their complementaries, native genius, unfettered imagination, natural fluency. The oppositions remained central in the next century, and Jonson became ever more fixed on his side of them, but a revolution—the transformation of neo-classical into pre-Romantic values— was to reverse the relative prestige of the two sides completely and so destroy (as it must have seemed, for good) the monument that Jonson had built for himself. IV The materials for a history of Jonson’s reputation in the eighteenth century are so voluminous that any account here (and any collection of documents) must be more than usually selective. The range and quality of printed matter were themselves growing; and in a surprising variety of places, from newspapers to scholarly monographs, Jonson was alluded to, his literary authority invoked, his example quoted; his work was annotated in editions and essays, adapted in new versions and pillaged for stage pieces of all kinds. From among a large group of contributors to Jonson’s reputation in the period a few figures stand out. The most important is not a critic but an actor, David Garrick. By reviving Every Man in his Humour, The Alchemist, and (less successfully) Epicoene, and by appearing in the first two, he did more than anyone else to keep Jonson’s drama alive in the century. His Kitely attracted favourable attention46 but his performances as Abel Drugger, the tobacco-shop owner of The Alchemist, were triumphs: audiences begged Garrick as Drugger to ‘shake our sides with joy’.47 The numberless references that survive to the part itself and to Garrick’s extraordinary range as an actor from tragic heroes to the ludicrous tobacconist suggest that the role was one of the most famous of the century.48 The present collection includes Garrick’s own commentary on his acting of Drugger, and on The Alchemist, and various accounts by contemporaries of his performances in Jonson parts.49 In the world of Jonson criticism in the eighteenth century there is no figure who dominates the debate as Dryden had in the seventeenth century. Two names might be singled out from among the advocates of Jonson, however. Both are conservatives, defenders of the traditional estimate of Jonson’s merits. John Dennis was finding faults with Jonson’s comedies in the 1690s (in No. 96) but in the first part of the next century he was the leading champion of the Jonsonian comedy of humours, first against a comedy based on wit and love (No. 100) and then against genteel and sentimental comedy (No. 113). Peter Whalley is Jonson’s other great defender in the century. The view of Jonson’s character in the ‘Life’ prefixed to his edition of the works (No. 144, 1756) —Jonson appears there as stern, conscious of his merits, yet capable of warm friendship—was much quoted by the commentators who followed him. The notes in the edition point to instances of ‘decorum’ and ‘propriety’ in the plays, to their exactness and thoughtfulness. He is also alert to passages where Jonson seemed to him to attain the sublimity for which Shakespeare and Fletcher were better known. He draws attention to Jonson’s lyric gifts,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 13

answering the criticism, commonplace in the period, of his harshness in versification,50 and anticipating the revival in interest in the next century in his songs and lyrics. Two other writers in the century should be mentioned here for their closely argued judgements on Jonson. Richard Hurd in 1753 chose examples from his plays to illustrate two typical faults in dramatic composition: Every Man out of his Humour, Hurd says, shows ‘the extravagance of building dramatic characters on abstract ideas’, and The Alchemist is based on the ‘particular and partial’, and is therefore an ‘impure’ mixture of comedy and farce (No. 140). The first of these illustrations was especially influential. Hurd also presents some detailed evidence of Jonson’s imitation of ancient authors in No. 145. Richard Cumberland is a second critic who offers extended argument and some careful conclusions on Jonson’s achievement: despite a decided preference for Shakespeare as a literary personality (Jonson, he says, is a pedant, Shakespeare ‘a gentleman who wrote at his ease’) he concludes that Bobadil in Every Man in his Humour is better conceived as a braggart character than Pistol, and Volpone the ‘nearest to perfection of any English play’ (No. 178). Of the broad trends in Jonson’s reception in the eighteenth century the clearest is a sharp decline in his standing, noticeable from the 1730s onwards. Jonson suffered from the progressive abandonment of the neo-classical values with which he was identified and which he himself had championed. The fall in Jonson’s reputation also reflects a movement associated with this shift in values: the elevation of Shakespeare to become what was called ‘a kind of established Religion in Poetry’, or, less sympa-thetically, the Shakespeare bigotry.51 The energy of the Shakespeare movement was such that it seems best to regard it as an important factor in itself, rather than merely a consequence of the shift from neoclassical assumptions. In the twin struggle to establish more Romantic values, and to raise Shakespeare to a national idol, Jonson played a surprisingly prominent part. The Shakespeare enthusiasts demanded rivalries and contests rather than any balancing of qualities: theirs was an exclusive, ideological fervour. The new atmosphere encouraged a Shakespeare hegemony and required a clearly identifiable enemy. Jonson naturally filled this role, as the creator of a strikingly different kind of drama from Shakespeare’s and as an energetic proponent of his own artistic system. Moreover, he was a notable critic of Shakespeare. The new mode of campaigning called for more and more evidence of Jonson’s villainy, and this was duly supplied. No doubt his work was bound to fall somewhat in esteem as attitudes changed in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the end of the period his popularity may well have been confined to the scholars, as Malone suggested when he declared that Jonson ‘stalked on the stilts of an artificial reputation’.52 Yet, as the result of the entanglement of his critical fortunes with Shakespeare’s, the enthusiasts for the latter exerted themselves to dismiss altogether Jonson’s claims to literary importance. The documents from the early part of the eighteenth century show that Jonson’s standing was then largely intact. There was general agreement that Jonson’s tragedies were not suited to the theatre, however worthy of respect for their learning; but if English comedy was to be described, the name of Jonson came to mind first. Charles Gildon, sketching the shadowy beginnings of English comedy, is in no doubt that though The Merry Wives of Windsor might be allowable as a comedy, and elsewhere there are ‘excellent Humours scatter’d about’, Jonson was the first ‘that ever gave us one entire Comedy’ (No. 106(a), 1710). In Gildon’s essay within the covers of Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare, published in the same year, he declares him superior to Jonson in sprightly comic dialogue, but names Jonson as the best pattern for comedy (No. 106(b)).

14 BEN JONSON

Treating comedy in his Complete Art of Poetry of 1718, Gildon mentions among the English writers only Jonson and Thomas Randolph, ‘one of the adopted sons of the famous Ben Jonson’.53 A division of the spoils was common: Dennis declared that Shakespeare was supreme in English tragedy as Jonson was in English comedy; in the 1740s, Garrick reinforced the symmetry by providing a famous Lear and Macbeth in Shakespearean tragedy to contrast with his Abel Drugger in a Jonsonian comedy.54 Jonson’s humour comedy was the official English comedy, and on the writing of proper comedies Jonson was the authority. Those who found fault with Jonson did so whilst acknowledging their temerity. The critic in a dialogue from 1702 (No. 101) points out an improbability in Volpone, begging Jonson’s pardon for his presumption; one of his listeners comments: ‘Your Example of Ben is enough to justifie this practice in some Men’s Opinion.’ Dennis, attacking Sir Richard Steele in 1720, not only cast Steele as the Sir Epicure Mammon of the London scene but rebuked him on the awful authority of Jonson for having doubted the importance of the rules in writing the perfect comedy (No. 111). At the centre of the understanding of comedy based on Jonson’s works and pronouncements was the concept of the humours. Comedy, so the theory went, teaches by exposing the ridiculous; humours are the source of the ridiculous.55 Moreover, English humours were especially distinct and copious.56 Morose in Epicoene was well established as the paradigm of a humours character; Farquhar in 1702 cites him as a prime example of ‘the most unaccountable Medley of Humours’ in England.57 References to Jonson in the early part of the century take another form familiar from the past. He appears as a legendary figure, a man gruff but lovable, scornful of modern entertainments but a convivial soul none the less. In this form Jonson’s ‘spirit’ was invoked, as earlier, to rebuke the feeble diversions occupying the contemporary stage (No. 102). In 1715 Lewis Theobald chose the nom de plume of ‘Benjamin Johnson’, descendant of the playwright, for his paper The Censor, in which he presents himself as a stern enemy of the social and literary abuses of the day (No. 109). Jonson notes to himself there how the quality of his imagination depends on the kind and quantity of wine available; in William Guthrie’s vision of 1738 he appears with his pockets stuffed with classical authors for adroit quotation and outjests a whole assembly of literary spirits in Westminster Abbey.58 Jonson’s accumulated prestige was called on in all sorts of campaigns, from Dennis’s attempts to stem the advance of a debased comedy based on wit, romance, and sentiment to the resistance to the prime ministership of Sir Robert Walpole, who acquired the satirical nicknames Volpone and (less frequently) Sejanus.59 Jonson was the great example of rational, moral, and not necessarily pleasing drama, as he is for Gildon in 1721 (No. 112); as in the previous century, he provided a standard to be flourished by literary, social, and political reformers. The account of a visit to a Jonson play in No. 119, from 1733, sums up usefully the view of Jonson in this period. His work is shown comfortably installed at the centre of English comedy and English culture. In the article a certain Sir Jasper Truby is described going to the playhouse to see a comedy. Not a mere farce, nor a concoction of ‘Jest’ and ‘Repartee’, but a ‘true comedy’ based on humours and character—Jonson’s Volpone. Sir Jasper’s reactions recapitulate familiar themes in Jonson criticism—like Dennis in No. 96 (a), he does not find Corbaccio’s deafness amusing; he is prompted by the plot to wonder where the action will lead, as Jonson himself has Damplay wonder about the action of The Magnetic Lady (No. 40).60 He is horrified by the villains, admiring of the blameless Celia and Bonario, and edified by the ending of the play. These responses confirm that the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 15

knight is an ‘honest man’ and a ‘Lover of Vertue’, according to the writer; Jonson’s comedy provides a touchstone for sound feelings and honest reactions. The middle decades of the century transformed this consensus and dislodged Jonson from his central position. By the 1780s his work, and the personality which lay behind it, are more likely to be seen as peculiar and perverse. A reviewer of 1784, for instance, says Francis Waldron’s continuation of The Sad Shepherd, published the previous year, is wide of the mark because the ‘sternness and severity’ in the original inevitably clashes with ‘the overflowing good nature of the imitator’ (No. 177). Jonson had been a representative of this good nature; now he is at odds with it. The underlying reasons for Jonson’s displacement must be changes in values during the period. Earlier preferences for satire over celebration in comedy, for correctness over inspiration, for art over nature, for learning over originality, for judgement over feeling, were simply reversed, and with them, Jonson’s supremacy over Shakespeare. Critics from the 1740s on complain that far from striking chords with soundness and honesty, Jonson fails to touch the heart.61 The notion becomes commonplace, and more trenchant as time goes on: for David Erskine Baker in 1764 it is ‘the feelings of the heart’ Jonson fails to write to (No. 153), for a reviewer in 1776 it is ‘the human heart’ that Jonson missed describing (No. 171 (e)). Almost always the commentators mention Shakespeare in the same breath, as the dramatist who does touch the heart. The process by which Jonson’s comedy is pushed to one side can be observed in changing interpretations of the term ‘humour’. It had been used for an anti-social obsession attacked in satirical comedy; it came to mean something more like a lovable comic eccentricity. Corbyn Morris writes in 1744 of a ‘jovial and gay’ humour, brought to its highest pitch in Falstaff (No. 124). Moreover, critics express a distate for ‘humours’ of the old kind. In place of Jonson’s comedy of ridicule, in which mean and tiresome humours are hunted down, Morris wants a comedy of ‘warm universal benevolence’. In No. 143 Jonson’s ‘humour’ is treated as simply another word for ‘spite’. These writers are reflecting that distaste for laughter and ridicule which can be traced back to Hobbes and which Addison and Steele voice in the early part of the eighteenth century.62 With this distaste went a preference for sentimental comedy, comedy which evoked feelings and presented genteel characters who provided a model for virtuous behaviour. Fielding, writing in 1742, is fighting a rearguard action in declaring the ridiculous the basis of comedy, and Jonson as its model, as well as suggesting Jonsonian comedy as a ‘Preparative’ for readers whose tastes have been vitiated by ‘genteel comedy’ (No. 123(c)). At the same time, Garrick began his revivals of Jonson on the stage, contributing in a practical way to this action. If he is the author of the letters signed ‘The Ghost of Gay’ in The Morning Post in late 1776 he was involved too in the campaign in print for the satirical comedy of Jonson, Congreve, and Gay and against the gentility, morality, and bombast of contemporary drama.63 Despite these efforts, hostility to Jonson’s comedy, and to its humours characters especially, continued as the century progressed. They were condemned for being unpleasant company and for reflecting a distorted view of human nature. For Arthur Murphy in the 1750s they are ‘disagreeably odd’,64 offering not beauty (like Shakespeare’s) but ‘deformity’ (No. 141). The writer in No. 164 (1772) shows how Jonson’s satire has become a liability: Bobadil is vice personified, and in him Jonson ‘debased’ the human species; Falstaff, on the other hand, is a character from Nature and a desirable companion. Thomas Davies in 1783–4 thought Jonson’s women characters especially disagreeable (No. 176(c)). As the century progressed, almost all the terms

16 BEN JONSON

which had sustained Jonson’s prestige were transformed in similar fashion. Far from commending Jonson for his learning, as had been the habit of countless writers, Edward Young declared in 1759 that Jonson ‘was very learned, as Sampson was very strong, to his own hurt’ (No. 148). The Scottish philosopher Beattie’s version was that ‘Ben Johnson’s misfortune was, not that he knew too much, but that he could not make a proper use of his knowledge’ (No. 158). For Edward Capell, writing in 1766, Jonson’s imitations from the classical authors, once one of the standard grounds for praising him, are only a shade the right side of plagiarism; the title of his pamphlet, significantly, is Reflections on Originality in Authors (No. 156). With these changes through the middle decades of the century went other shifts in attitudes to Jonson. It had been accepted as early as the Restoration that Jonson’s tragedies were better enjoyed in the study than in performance. In the eighteenth century the comedies, too, are spoken of as better read than seen. Peter Whalley puts it down to the allusions in his work to the customs of his own day and to the writings of the ancients, allusions which are ‘lost in the representation’.65 A reviewer in 1771 says Volpone’s lack of incident and of ‘interest in the catastrophe’ makes it better adapted to the closet than to the stage (No. 163(a)). There was a great deal of Jonson performed on stage in the century, before Garrick as well as in his time. Yet commentators often argue that it is the actors who are supporting Jonson, rather than the other way around. A writer in 1772 says the plays only survive on stage because of the powers of some particular actors, and will perish with them (No. 164 (a)). There were those, like Murphy in No. 146, who suggested that Garrick kept The Alchemist alive, and (with some justification) that Drugger was as much his creation as Jonson’s (Nos 150, 161). It is Garrick, not Jonson, whom Thomas Wilkes applauds for his ‘deep knowledge of the human heart’ in Abel Drugger (No. 147). Isaac Reed in the Biographia Dramatica suggests that the ‘manners’ of Bodadil in the same play are obsolete but the part has become through the acting of Henry Woodward ‘one of the chastest and most pleasing pieces of acting perhaps ever exhibited’. Jonson was regarded as particularly difficult to act: Garrick describes the extraordinary preparation needed to perform in Every Man in his Humour in a letter of 1759.66 There were also changes in the way Jonson’s works were looked at as a whole. Jonson might have believed that as a classic poet and dramatist his works were all of even and superlative quality—his outrage at the rejection of The New Inn suggests so—but, as we have seen, his contemporaries quickly established a hierarchy among his works, opponents singling out the late plays as inferior, supporters like James Howell categorizing Jonson’s various works according to how inspired Jonson had been in composing them. In the eighteenth century this process accelerated, as Jonson’s critical reputation declined. Once Shakespeare had been a byword for unevenness—his works flashes of genius alternating with stretches of garbled nonsense—while Jonson could be relied on to keep up a certain standard of correctness. Now, the positions are frequently reversed. William Warburton in 1734 noted that where in Jonson’s ‘bad Pieces’ there is no trace of the author of Volpone and The Alchemist, there is something of the ‘divine’ Shakespeare in all his works. The reason Warburton offers is that without Art Jonson had nothing ‘to support him’, while Shakespeare, relying on Nature, never quite lost the ‘force and splendour’ of his genius (No. 120(a)). Warburton is echoed by writers later in the century, though the supports Jonson relied on are described in various ways: for Guthrie in 1747 they are the ‘stilts’ of the ‘close observation of nature, and strict application of study’ (No. 127); John Upton in 1749 says Jonson needed ‘the guides of antiquity’ to find his way in writing (No. 132).

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 17

As Jonson’s reputation for ‘correctness’ throughout his work waned, and his authority as a literary dictator grew less intimidating, writers began to make free with his work for adaptations and new dramatic pieces. Dryden had thought there was ‘little to retrench or alter’ in Jonson’s works (No. 67); but by the middle of the eighteenth century that attitude had changed, though it was still agreed that Jonson needed less adaptation than Shakespeare.67 Arthur Murphy in 1757 thought Hoadley’s The Suspicious Husband, which had borrowed from Every Man in his Humour, superior to Jonson’s original because Hoadley had ‘lopped Excrescences’ in it (No. 146(c)). Francis Gentleman adapted Sejanus, with the idea of making it more dramatic—less of an exposition of history—and a demonstration of ‘moral justice’; certainly his additions give Sejanus a guilty conscience reminiscent of Macbeth’s (No. 137, 1751). Garrick trimmed Every Man in his Humour and The Alchemist, and modernized the dialogue, deftly expanding Abel Drugger’s role in the latter.68 Gentleman went a step further, removed ‘superfluous’ characters (as a review, No. 162(b), puts it) and based an entire play on Drugger, calling it The Tobacconist. George Colman produced a revised Epicoene in 1776 (No. 171) and cut the subplot from Volpone for his version of 1783. John Brown argued to Garrick that Bartholomew Fair needed revision, since it contained great comic material but lacked ‘a plan’; his version was completed, but never acted (No. 155). Garrick’s success with Abel Drugger showed the way for farces based on Jonson. Gentleman’s The Coxcombs (1771) and Colman’s Ut Pictura Poesis (1789) were both based on Epicoene. Gentleman’s The Pantheonites (1773) included a character called Daniel Drugger—Abel’s great-grandson; Samuel Foote produced a farce on Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee scheme, called Drugger’s Jubilee (1770). In some respects the changes in Jonson’s reputation simply follow a shift in the balance from one side of a traditional opposition to the other. Diverting and celebratory comedy came to be preferred to satirical comedy, untutored genius to learned artistry, and so on. But there is also a change in the terms of debate. A new spirit of partisanship is evident in the documents, a new emphasis on an active rivalry between the principal protagonists. The traditional formula for discussing the two great playwrights side by side involved a balancing of complementary qualities, an exercise in distinguishing differences which often concluded that Shakespeare and Jonson in fact could not be compared. In No. 117, from 1731, William Levin analyses even-handedly Shakespeare’s ‘Excellencies’ and Jonson’s ‘Perfections’, bold invention and energetic expression in Shakespeare, well-woven plots and well-differentiated characters in Jonson.69 With the Shakespeare apologists, this exercise in balancing is sharpened to an ideological rivalry, a life-or-death struggle in which only one mode of creation can survive. Horace Walpole, discussing the quarrel between Jonson and Inigo Jones in 1762, was in no doubt that Jonson had put himself in the wrong by the ‘grossness’ of his language on Jones, his ‘brutal abuse’ of his opponent; Jonson’s presumption extended to making himself a rival to Shakespeare, with whom ‘he had not the smallest pretensions to be compared’ (No. 151). In the middle decades of the century Shakespeare not only took over Jonson’s central position in discussions of English literary history, he also displaced his contemporary even in treatments of Jonson himself. A review of Volpone from 1771 (No. 163(a)) is a case in point: the mention of Burbage, Heminge, and Condell of the original cast of Jonson’s play leads to a lengthy account of these actors’ connections with Shakespeare. After brief comments on the cast of the present production, the writer spends two pages on the superiority of Shakespeare to Jonson in the drawing of character and in all other departments. Jonson is almost forgotten in what becomes a purely Shakespearean discourse. Lord Camden, writing to Garrick in 1774, protests at the way the reflex

18 BEN JONSON

comparison with Shakespeare has invaded the appreciation of Jonson, and at the commonplace criticisms of Jonson’s ‘Art’, criticisms now threatening to sink the playwright altogether as an uninspired pedant (No. 167). By 1798 Nathan Drake, a convinced Shakespearean, can ‘look back in wonder’ at the time when Jonson was preferred to Shakespeare (No. 182). Another sign of change in the terms of literary debate is the new emphasis given to the character of the writer. Ideas about Jonson’s personality had figured prominently in discussions of his work from his own time: they were the products ultimately of his own strenuous self-presentation. In the early part of the eighteenth century, as has been noted, a bluff and genial Jonson appears frequently. Yet in the course of the century a new earnestness about the application of matters of personality to literary questions is evident, and a new intensity of interest in the character of Jonson as revealed in his relations with Shakespeare. The idea of a ‘malignant Ben’ had begun in the early part of the century. Nicholas Rowe’s ‘Account’ of Shakespeare’s life (1710) gives the story of the relations between the two writers a peculiarly potent turn. The story is told of the early Jonson play which had been rejected by the actors but was taken up by Shakespeare, who persuaded the company to put it on. Jonson’s return for this kindness was a bitter envy of his benefactor, according to Rowe; he professed friendship but in fact cast ‘an evil Eye’ upon his fellow playwright, whose genius and facility he resented (No. 105). There were protests at the turn that the ‘rivalry’ between the two poets was taking; Pope, in the introduction to his Shakespeare edition of 1725, pooh-poohed the idea that the two playwrights were enemies, for the actor Betterton had told him there was nothing in the story, and declared his opinion that the whole thing was the invention of factions on behalf of one author or the other (No. 114). Peter Whalley echoed Pope on the place of partisanship in accounts of the quarrel, citing ‘the honourable Testimony which Johnson hath left of his beloved Shakespeare’.70 But once the idea was established that to attack Jonson was to serve the cause of Shakespeare, commentators vied with each other to belittle Jonson’s literary achievements, and to produce evidence of his malign character and his active spitefulness towards his ‘rival’. The notion of Jonson’s ‘evil Eye’ on Shakespeare came to prevail over all other aspects of the relationship-even over the apparently lavish praise of Shakespeare in Jonson’s ode to his memory—and was to cloud all aspects of Jonson’s reputation, allied as it was to convictions about Jonson’s personality and about the nature of his creativity. Richard Hurd has already been quoted for his influential analysis of Jonson’s faults as a writer of comedy. In the same work (No. 140) he connects these faults—his descent into farce, the excessiveness of his humours characters—with his personality: ‘his nature was severe and rigid, and this in giving a strength and manliness, gave at times too, an intemperance to his satyr. His taste for ridicule was strong but indelicate’. The same theory is put to cruder use in Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s novel The Cry (No. 143, 1754). In a melodramatic version of Rowe’s paragraphs on Jonson’s relations with Shakespeare, Jonson is pictured as the serpent in Shakespeare’s bosom, driven by ‘unconquerable envy’ to do all he could to impede his rival’s progress. Shakespeare’s majestic forbearance and Jonson’s irrepressible malice are unmistakable since their inmost souls are revealed in their works. The Shakespeare partisans were not satisfied with the evidence of Jonson’s envy and malignity which survived in anecdote, let alone with what there was in the historical record; a number of inventions were required. In 1748 there appeared in a newspaper a letter from the actor Charles Macklin, describing the contents of a pamphlet in his

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 19

possession (No. 130). The pamphlet, Macklin says, collected ‘all the Contempts and Invectives’ showered by ‘this Tyrant’ Jonson on the head of Shakespeare, too extensive to be quoted, but all, Macklin assures his readers, proving his ‘Ill-Nature and Ingratitude’ to Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, no such pamphlet has ever been discovered. Nevertheless, Macklin’s letter was reprinted as a note to Jonson’s ode to his fellow playwright in George Steevens’s edition of The Plays of Shakespeare. For Steevens, it showed how different Jonson’s other statements about Shakespeare were from the sentiments of the poem. Malone took over Steevens’s note in his edition of The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare (1790) but included an essay arguing that the letter was in fact an invention of Macklin’s. Having demolished the credibility of the pamphlet, Malone felt he had to reassure Shakespeare’s admirers that there would remain nevertheless abundant proofs of the gentleness, modesty, and humility, of Shakespeare; of the overweening arrogance of old Ben; and of the ridiculous absurdity of his partizans, who for near a century set above our great dramatick poet a writer who no man is now hardy enough to mention as even his competitor.71 The article on Jonson in The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) quotes Drummond’s Conversations with Jonson, which had not yet been published in full, as to Jonson’s character. Drummond gives a colourful, often unsympathetic picture of his visitor, describing him as scornful, a toper, ‘passionately kind and angry’, and so on; but this is not enough for the compiler, Robert Shiells, who interpolates the following sentence within the inverted commas marking the quotation from Drummond: ‘In short, he was in his personal character the very reverse of Shakespear, as surly, ill-natured, proud and disagreeable, as Shakespear with ten times his merit was gentle, good-natured, easy and amiable’ (No. 139). Here, readers must have concluded, was the man’s contemporary, after having had him to stay in his house, expressing indignation at his attitude to Shakespeare; and the interpolation stood in the record until the Conversations were published in full in 1833. Thomas Davies, in his Dramatic Micellanies of 1783–4, offered the innovation of an inset invented scene for the Shakespeareans to gloat over, the spectacle of Jonson ‘with an assumed countenance of gaiety, and with envy in his heart’ pretending to enjoy the triumph of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2 in the theatre.72 Jonson had of course criticized Shakespeare. In a famous passage in his Discoveries, Shakespeare’s facility in composing is considered: I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov’d the man, and do honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flow’d with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stop’d…. (ll. 647–59) Jonson here tries to protect his criticism of Shakespeare by a carefully constructed context, to ensure that posterity, unlike the players, would not think it ‘a malevolent

20 BEN JONSON

speech’. Needless to say, Jonson’s late-eighteenth-century posterity followed the players’ view with enthusiasm; when Dr Johnson unluckily suggested in his notes to The Winter’s Tale that he believed one particular word ‘should be blotted out’, a reviewer protested that It seems as if the very name of Johnson was fated to cast invidious reflections on that of Shakespeare; as if it was malignantly formed to absorb the rays diffused by superior lustre, and enviously to sully, with a reflected gloom, the fountain of its own light. —This scheme of blotting-out was originally suggested by a Johnson….73 There were some grounds for the belief that Jonson harboured mixed feelings towards Shakespeare. One recent writer argues that there is a ‘touch of obsessiveness’ in Jonson’s allusions to Shakespeare, as in his references to Inigo Jones: Shakespeare contradicted all Jonson stood for and was ‘an obstacle to Jonson’s proper recognition as dangerous as Inigo Jones and, since it was impossible to hate him, all the more frustrating’.74 Yet the fervent partisanship of the eighteenth-century Shakespeare editors, excited by the legend of Jonson’s ‘malignity’, acted as a magnet which, when passed over Jonson’s works, formed almost all his criticisms of unspecified current plays into a pattern pointing infallibly to Shakespeare. George Steevens was perhaps outstanding among these editors for the number of ‘sneers’ he collected and for the bitterness of his reproaches against Jonson for making them (No. 166). But in the notes to variorum editions like Isaac Reed’s The Plays of William Shakespeare (1785), Malone can be found labelling Jonson ‘this envious detractor’, and again warning that he was a man ‘envious, and unfriendly to our author’, and Thomas Tyrwhitt shaking his head at the ‘malignant pleasure with which Jonson continued to ridicule’ Shakespeare.75 Jonson’s ‘Ode’ to Shakespeare is either interpreted as bitterly ironical, or else it is conceded that Jonson must for once have ‘purged’ himself of his envy (No. 176(b)). The ‘happy genius’ who Jonson says collaborated with him on Sejanus must be Shakespeare, and the references to his contributions, which Jonson calls ‘so good a share’, must be sarcasms.76 There was, in short, a good deal of propaganda produced in the course of the campaign against Jonson. Genuine evidence, imaginary allusions, fictions admitted to or disguised, were all pressed into service to establish the necessary myth of a gentle Shakespeare tormented by a malicious rival. The forger William Henry Ireland invented a reply from the saintly victim: in a letter he fabricated about 1795, but never published, Shakespeare (in outrageously whimsical spelling) reproaches Jonson for his supercilious treatment of him: Shakespeare begs Heminge ‘to speake toe Masterre Johnsonne who hathe treatedde mee mouste hawttylye’. At the close of the century, George Chalmers was busy identifying yet another Jonson ‘sneer’ against Shakespeare —arguing that the ‘Poet-Ape’ of Jonson’s Epigram 56 was in fact Shakespeare.77 By then, of course, the Shakespeareans had well and truly carried the day. This fact in itself took some of the energy out of the campaign against Jonson. Malone’s reluctant demolition of the Macklin pamphlet in his 1790 essay showed the way to more cautious interpretations of evidence; and in the next century, Jonson was cleared of the more preposterous charges against him. In the eighteenth century, then, Jonson fell from grace. The qualities he stood for lost favour; a handful of comedies survived on stage and kept some reputation, but his work came to seem uninspired and, when unsupported by scholarly labours, not even welljudged or correct. The traditional comparisons with Shakespeare became harshly

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 21

invidious; and as Shakespeare-worship gained followers and intensity Jonson seemed of value only as a sacrifice on his altar. Jonson’s fate seemed sealed: ‘There is no reviving the dead’, as Davies says of a production of Epicoene (No. 176(d)). Among the remarkable things in this story is Jonson’s prescience about the whole matter. He had seen that posterity, like the players, might think his comment on Shakespeare’s facility was ‘a malevolent speech’. By a curious irony in the drama of the relations between the two writers, Jonson’s ‘Ode’ has given to Shakespeare criticism a number of phrases adequate to the appetite of even the extremists among the Shakespeareprotagonists. Jonson’s comments in Discoveries, already quoted, anticipate, even as they demur at, the phenomenon of Shakespeare-idolatry. By some irresistible logic, the poet who declared Shakespeare ‘not of an age, but for all time’ established a formula which was not only formidable praise of his fellow poet but, in its reversed form, neatly encapsulated the damning conclusions that the eighteenth century arrived at about his own work: declaring him no universal genius but of his time merely, interesting and important only to historians and scholars. V The present collection of documents ends with Nathan Drake’s essay of 1798 (No. 182). Jonson’s further critical fortunes in the nineteenth century, and beyond, can only be briefly sketched here: proper treatment would require another volume such as this one. Certainly the beginning of the new century brought only confirmation of the success of the campaign against Jonson. For Charles Dibdin in A Complete History of the Stage (1800) pedantry, scurrility, and plagiarism in the work go with envy and spite in the personality: Jonson demonstrates the negative side of the cherished belief that true creativity belongs with an open-hearted, generous character. This is the Jonson of the doctrinaire Shakespeareans, one whose malign character pervades all his writing. He had in Dibdin’s summary phrase ‘a repulsive mind’.78 The Romantic critics of the period immediately following inherited the view of Jonson Dibdin voices, even if they formulated it less crudely. Coleridge, the most penetrating of them, paid tribute to his originality but thought him something short of a genius—an ‘Intellect’ only—and lamented the absence in Volpone, and in the whole of Jonson’s works save for The Sad Shepherd, of any character ‘in whom you are morally interested’. Schlegel held that Jonson was ‘a critical poet in the good and bad sense of the word’, a view that was influential throughout the century. What Jonson had put into his work, Schlegel suggested, the critic could extract, down to the smallest detail; nothing inexpressible or indefinable was left.79 It was this ‘nameless something’, or ‘soul’, that Schlegel valued most highly of all. The first comments by another German Romantic, Ludwig Tieck, are early enough to be included in this volume (No. 181). Tieck was greatly interested in Jonson, but in the end saw his importance only in terms of Shakespeare, as following the false trail of an opposite kind of art as far as it could go and thus providing the perfect foil for the achievement of his contemporary. Of the English Romantics, Hazlitt elaborated the comparisons with Shakespeare most damningly. With a show of fairness, he admitted in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers of 1819 that his dislike for Jonson might be a deficiency in his own taste: ‘There are people who cannot taste olives—and I cannot much relish Ben Jonson.’ But the development of his parallel of Jonson and Shakespeare

22 BEN JONSON

suggests something different: Jonson is the grub, Shakespeare the butterfly; his characters are like machines. He has merit, but ‘of a repulsive and unamiable kind’.80 The appreciation of Jonson’s works was thus still bedevilled by myths from the previous century about Jonson’s personality. A new start could only be made by answering the charges against Jonson and rehabilitating his character. The work was begun by Octavius Gilchrist and William Godwin,81 but it was Gifford’s edition of Jonson, published in 1816, that turned the attack onto the critics of Jonson’s character so vigorously that it was soon acknowledged that an injustice had been done. Gifford also complained loudly about the ‘prejudice’ against Jonson’s works, and about how little they were known. In re-establishing an audience and a critical reputation for his subject, he was less successful. The occasional reviewer might wish for a revival of Jonson’s drama to reform a decadent age82 (Gifford’s edition was in something of this spirit), but for most in the nineteenth century it was no longer worth the labour of reading: Jonson was obsolete and dispensable.83 It was, however, difficult to fit all aspects of the works into the now well-established picture of an earthbound, pedantic Jonson. In particular, it was common to marvel at the sweetness and delicacy of a few of his lyrics and songs. Even Hazlitt declared one such piece ‘a perfect “nest of spicery’”.84 In fact, if Jonson survived at all into the Victorian period, it was as a lyric poet. From early in the century some poems, and even some stanzas, were praised and anthologized, while his other verse was dismissed for its ‘coarseness’ and ‘quaintness’.85 A ‘few beautiful lyrics’ were distinguished from the ‘tedious reading’ provided by the poetry in general.86 Tennyson found that Jonson generally seemed to ‘move in a wide sea of glue’; but with his approval Francis Palgrave included several short pieces in The Golden Treasury of 1861,87 with the result that ‘It is not growing like a tree’ from the Cary-Morison ode, ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair’ from Cynthia’s Revels and ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’ (The Forest, 9) became as well known as any lyrics in the language. The poems and the masques as a group came to be regarded as Jonson’s real achievement; his genius, it was decided, was poetic rather than dramatic; Jonson was supreme in the lyric as Shakespeare was in the drama.88 A small collection of Jonson’s verse was highlighted and praised to the skies while almost all the rest of his works sank out of sight. He was puzzled over as a mixture of incompatible qualities, a writer who could not be resolved into a single identity: he was a leviathan, massive and unwieldy, yet he was also a poet of elegance and grace; rough, but capable of ‘Ariel beauty’.89 Swinburne gave the question of Jonson’s peculiar œuvre another twist by suggesting that his poetry had been overrated, but that a single leaf of his prose work Discoveries was worth all the lyrics, tragedies, elegies, and epigrams put together.90 Nevertheless, the tradition of celebrating Jonson’s lyrics as unexpected and precious continued: they were ‘exquisite’ like stray sunbeams in a wood, the products of his ‘rarer moods’.91 Perhaps the strangest episode in the nineteenth century’s fascination with the inconsistency of Jonson’s work was the elevation of passages which he never claimed as his own above all the rest of his writing. A reviewer of 1890 calls the additions to The Spanish Tragedy ‘the one effort of his dramatic imagination (supposing it to be his) which had the power of speaking to the great human heart’.92 Jonson’s work, for the nineteenth century, was bafflingly inconsistent. All sorts of solutions to the problem were offered. Leigh Hunt argued that the masques showed ‘the luxuriance and volatility of his fancy’, qualities which elsewhere were thwarted and distorted; a reviewer in 1874 suggested that what Jonson had lacked was a father and family life.93 The conviction that there were two incongruous Jonsons persisted into the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 23

next century: in 1905 Greg called The Sad Shepherd the great achievement of ‘that other Jonson’; in 1919 G.Gregory Smith agreed: in the pastoral, as nowhere else, the playwright had let slip ‘the leashed spaniels of imagination’; this romantic Jonson may be ‘the best Jonson’, even if not finally the ‘true’ one.94 It was T.S.Eliot’s reviews of Smith’s book95 that signalled that interest in classic art had revived, an interest which made new appreciations of Jonson possible. Herford and Simpson were already at work on their edition, the first volume appearing in 1925, the eleventh and last in 1952. A vastly expanded critical effort since then has established once again the power and subtlety of Jonson’s best work, in his great comedies but also in his poems, his masques, and even in his tragedies. His moral vision, his dramatic technique, and the nature of his imitation of ancient authors have been explored in turn. More recently writers have examined the way in which Jonson deliberately shaped his career and have focused on his relationships with his audiences, with the powerful in his society, and with his own family. From the vantage-point of the present—profiting from this work—much of the comment on Jonson included in this collection seems simple-minded and repetitive. For instance, he was recognized from the beginning of his career as a remarkable creator of characters. In his own time, he was accused of satirizing individuals in the plays, and of reproducing real-life ‘humours’ mechanically. To commentators in the Restoration, on the other hand, his characters sometimes appeared extravagant or improbable: Dryden defends Morose from the charge by reporting that he was based on an actual case, Edward Howard justified the same character on the grounds of the right of the poet to create the fantastic. In the next century Hurd suggested that Jonson’s characterization was faulty because it was based on abstractions. Writers like Whalley saw the contradiction in accusing Jonson both of remoteness from life and of making a literal transcription of it, but were hardly able to resolve the problem. Even Coleridge repeated the charge that Jonson’s characters were abstractions. The argument through all these commentators swings between accusations of excessive lifelikeness and accusations of extreme abstractness, with little sense of progress or insight. It is fixated on what was early established to be Jonson’s contribution to the drama, humours characters. Yet (as it now seems) Jonson’s greatest achievements in characterization have nothing to do with the rigid patterns the commentators describe. To take two obvious examples from Volpone, there is the hero, whose motivation is a key enigma in the play-never quite explained by the greed for sensation he admits to-and there is Mosca, a dizzying mixture of chameleon adaptability and bottomless egotism. Yet from a different perspective the critical work of earlier centuries remains important. Because Jonson was peculiarly self-conscious about his project as a writer, because he felt his work was decisive in the making of the culture of his time, the conditions in which it originated and its immediate and longer-term reception remain crucial for its understanding. How is the personality that forces itself on audiences’ and readers’ attention in Jonson’s work to be reckoned with? Is his active self-promotion reprehensible, and does it reduce the power of the work? Is the personality that comes across bluff but honest, or simply a bully? Is Jonson truly a classic poet, as he himself argued, or was he his own worst enemy in forcing his creative energies into that mould and in demanding appreciation in those terms? Is an alternative Jonson—anarchic, lyrical, passionate—the true one, realized in a few of his verses, in his masques, in his pastoral, or even in the great comedies? Is it possible, perhaps, to see an ideal Jonson, an unrealized potential? Again, Jonson made his own lack of popularity an issue from the beginning;

24 BEN JONSON

reacting angrily to failure in the theatre and also preaching the doctrine that public rejection was inevitable for the greatest of artists. Even now his unpopularity with audiences and readers puzzles critics, gives rise to regret and sometimes indignation. Finally, there is the triumph of Shakespeare’s supporters over Jonson in the eighteenth century and its consequences. In his own time, Jonson’s domination of the literary scene obscured Shakespeare’s virtues. Now, in a Shakespearean literary universe, Jonson helps put Shakespeare’s achievement into perspective, while Shakespeare’s example makes Jonson’s work difficult to judge or even to see clearly. In a special sense, then, Jonson is inseparable from his critical heritage: the student of his works in the late twentieth century must still begin with questions which he himself raised and which his contemporaries and his immediate posterity were compelled to answer. NOTES 1 Palladis Tamia (1598), fol. 283r. 2 Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599), p. 68. 3 W.David Kay argues convincingly that it was the second and more satirical of the two plays that established Jonson as the leading humours playwright: ‘The Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Career: A Reexamination of Facts and Problems’, Modern Philology (1970), lxvii, 224–37. 4 H & S, i, 217–18. 5 For the identification of characters in the plays of the Poetomachia with individuals of the time, see Josiah H.Penniman, The War of the Theatres (Philadelphia 1897); Roscoe A.Small, The Stage-Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and the So-Called Poetasters (Breslau 1899); Stuart Omans, ‘The War of the Theaters: An Approach to Its Origins, Development and Meaning’ (Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University 1969); and E.A.J.Honigmann, John Weever (Manchester 1987), ch. 5. For the background to the quarrels, see Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (San Marino, Calif. 1938), and Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York 1952), pp. 90–119. 6 H & S, i, 140. 7 Marston, The Plays, ed. Harvey Wood (Edinburgh 1939), iii, 258, and The Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool 1961), p. 102. 8 Stanley Fish, without referring to Poetaster, explores Jonson’s peculiar version of the ‘ideology of merit’ in the poems along similar lines, in ‘Authors-Readers: Jonson’s Community of the Same’, Representations (1984) vii, 26–58. 9 The White Devil (1612), Sig. A2r-v. 10 On Jonson and the laureateship, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, Calif. 1983), ch. 3. 11 Lucy, commendatory verse to The Alchemist (1612); Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford 1624), p. 401. 12 The Gratefull Servant (1630), dedication, Sig. A2r. 13 Gerald Eades Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (Chicago 1945), i, 70. 14 For Coventry’s comment, see Jonsonus Virbius (1638), p. 20; on elegies for Shakespeare, see S.Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford 1970), pp. 56–7. 15 Samuel Holland, Don Zara del Fuego: A Mock-Romance (1656), pp. 101–2. 16 See ‘The Second Prologue personated like Ben Johnson rising from below’ in Edward Howard’s The Womens Conquest (1671). Extracts from the preface to the play are given in No.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 25

78, below. The tradition continued through the century: Jonson returns to lash contemporary poets ‘into Sence’ in the anonymous The Tory-Poets: A Satyr (1682), p. 9. 17 As in Richard Brome’s commendatory verse in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Comedies and Tragedies (1647):

While this of Fletcher and his Works I speake: His Works (says Momus) nay, his Plays you’d say: Thou hast said right, for that to him was Play Which was to other braines a toyle; with ease He played on Waves which were their Troubled Seas…. Edward Howard uses the ‘works’ versus ‘plays’ formula without irony in No. 89. 18 The Noble Stranger, Sig. G3v (Act IV). Crambo in Shadwell’s adaptation of the Duke of Newcastle’s play The Triumphant Widow (acted 1674, published 1677) has Jonson’s works ‘apply’d to his head’ to correct the weakness of his Muse (pp. 59–61, Act IV). Richard Whitlock calls Jonson ‘justly confident’ in his statement, in Zω τ µια: or Observations on the Present Manners of the English (1654), p. 24, quoted in H & S, ix, 532; William Mountfort wishes he could share Jonson’s confidence in the prologue to The Injur’d Lovers (1688). 19 Bentley, i, 67–73. The phrase is used by John Denham in ‘On Mr. John Fletcher’s Workes’, in Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647), Sig. b1v. 20 ‘Of my Self’, in his Poems and Essays (1673), p. 81. 21 In the preface ‘To the Readers’, in Richard Brome, Five New Playes, ed. Alexander Brome (1659). The preface is apparently by ‘the Stationers’, named on the title page as ‘A.Crook’ and ‘H.Brome’. 22 Rochester, ‘An Allusion to Horace’, l. 60; Dryden, dedication to his translation of Juvenal, The Satires (1693), p. iii. 23 In his Essay of 1667 (No. 67). 24 Shadwell also noticed this technique, calling it ‘that connexion which the Incomparable Johnson first taught the Stage’: The Royal Shepherdess (1669), preface, Sig. A2r. 25 ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ (1694), l. 118. 26 Examen Poeticum (1693) dedication, Sig. [B6]v. 27 And again, also in the Essay, ‘As he did not want imagination, so none ever said he had much to spare’. 28 As R.Jack Smith notes in ‘Shadwell’s Impact upon John Dryden’, Review of English Studies (1944), xx, 29–44. 29 The term is from Dryden’s dedication to The Assignation (1673), Sig. 30 Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco (1674), preface, Sig. A2v. 31 Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco Revised (1674), preface, Sig. [A2]r. 32 The Assignation (1673), dedication, Sig. [A4]v. 33 Examen Poeticum (1693), dedication, Sig. [A5]r. 34 Rochester, ‘An Allusion to Horace’, l. 81. 35 Psyche: A Tragedy (1675), preface, Sig. [A3]r. 36 The Virtuoso (1676), dedication, Sig. a3r. 37 On the poem, and on the relations between Jonson, Dryden, and Shadwell generally, see Ian Donaldson, ‘Fathers and Sons: Jonson, Dryden and Mac Flecknoe’, Southern Review (1985), xviii, 314–27.

26 BEN JONSON

38 He cites Sylla’s ghost as another example of ‘extravagancies’ in Jonson in No. 89. Congreve defends Morose as properly extravagant in No. 96(c). 39 Friend, did my fame and Muse shine forth as bright As the renowned Ben’s, then would that light Like th’hour telling Sun, the Rectifier Of Clocks and Watches, shine to the whole quire Of common censurers…. (Commendatory verse to Hugo Grotius, Sophomphaneas, or Joseph. A Tragedy, ed. Francis Goldsmith (1652), Sig. Bv.) 40 A late Printed Sermon against False Prophets, Vindicated by Letter, from the causeless Aspersions of Mr Francis Cheynell (1647), pp. 21–2. 41 ‘To one that asked me why I would write an English Epigram after B. Johnson’, in his Clarastella (1650), p. 33, printed in Bentley, ii, 78. 42 One of the commendatory verses to the anonymous EIKΩN AAH INH (1649) mentions Jonson’s Catiline, but tells the author of the present work, ‘I make no doubt the knowing in our Age, /(As fooles did in his) will hiss thine off the stage’ (Sig. av). 43 There is a reference in the first printed version of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1672) to ‘Roman cloaths, guilded Truncheons, forc’d conceipt, smooth Verse, and a Rant’ in the production (pp. 38–9). 44 In the preface to an anonymous play in MS, of c. 1654, quoted in Bernard M.Wagner, ‘A Jonson Allusion, and Others’, Philological Quarterly (1948), vii, 307. 45 Brown’s character Bays (Dryden) is reporting how he diminished all rival poets, including Jonson, over his career: The Reasons of Mr. Bays Changing his Religion (1688), p. 15. 46 See No. 159(b). 47 ‘To Mr Garrick’, The Gentleman’s Magazine (1743), xiii, 489. 48 Robert Gale Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage 1660–1776 (Cambridge, Mass. 1935), p. 103. 49 Nos 125, 169; and Nos 136, 146(a), 150, 159, 170. 50 In a table in the Literary Magazine: Or, Universal Review (1758), iii, 6, Jonson scores 8 out of 20 for ‘Versifications’, the lowest score under that heading for any of the poets listed. 51 Arthur Murphy, The Gray’s-Inn Journal (1756), 1, 263 (no. 40, 28 July 1753); Sir John Hill, Some Remarks upon the new-revived Play of ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’ (1759), quoted in Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (1974–81), iv, 403. 52 See the note to Rowe’s ‘Account’ of Shakespeare’s life, in Malone’s edition of The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare (1790), i, Part i, p. 112. Malone assembles evidence that Jonson’s reputation even in his own time arose from the praises ‘that a few scholars gave him in their closets’, rather than from any general popularity (pp. 112–13). There is a vivid account of Jonson’s decline in reputation in the eighteenth century in Jonas A.Barish (ed.), Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1963), pp. 1–5. 53 i, 262–6. 54 Dennis, The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar (1720), p. 31; on Garrick’s contrasting roles, see ‘The Character of an excellent Actor’, The Gentleman’s Magazine (1743), xiii, 254 (reprinted from The British Champion (May 1743), n.s., v), and Garrick in No. 125. 55 Dennis expounds the theory energetically in No. 100, as does Gildon in No. 106(b). 56 So says Charles Gildon in a passage in The Laws of Poetry (1721), p. 251 (not printed in No. 112), quoting Congreve and Sir William Temple. 57 A Discourse upon Comedy, In Reference to the English Stage (1702), in Farquhar’s Works (1711), p. 72.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 27

58 ‘The Apotheosis of Milton. A Vision’, The Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1738), viii, 234. 59 The part played by Volpone in propaganda against Walpole is discussed in Graham William Nicholls, ‘Aspects of Stage Productions of Ben Jonson 1660–1776’ (Ph.D. thesis, St David’s College, Lampeter 1972), ch. 3. The leading article of The Country Journal: Or, The Craftsman, no. 153, 7 June 1729, is devoted to an application of Sejanus to Walpole. See also Robert Gale Noyes, ‘Volpone; Or, the Fox—the Evolution of a Nickname’, Harvard Studies in Philology and Literature (1934), xvi, 161–75. 60 Dryden comments on this aspect of Jonson’s artful plots in No. 67. 61 See Nos 132 (1749), 144 (1756), 152 (1763). 62 The texts are conveniently collected in Scott McMillin (ed.), Restoration and Eighteenth Century Comedy (New York 1973): Hobbes (1650) on pp. 343–4, Steele in 1704 and 1710 on pp. 367–70, and Addison (1711) on pp. 370–3. On the shift in the notion of ‘humour’, see Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago, Ill. 1960). 63 The Morning Post, and Daily Advertiser, 26 and 28 December 1776. The letter of 28 December defends a comedy of ‘knaves, fops, and fools’ against one based on ‘deck’d virtue, or brilliancy of sentiment’. The suggestion that the author might be Garrick is from Charles Harold Gray, Theatrical Criticism in London to 1795 (New York 1931), p. 228. 64 From an essay quoted in the headnote to No. 141. 65 An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare, With Remarks on Several Passages of his Plays (1748), pp. 22–3, 76–8. 66 Biographia Dramatica, or, A Companion to the Playhouse (1782), i, 755; Garrick, The Letters, ed. David M.Little, George M.Kahrl, and Phoebe de K.Wilson (Cambridge, Mass. 1963), i, 303–4. In No. 176(c), Davies discusses the difficulty of acting Jonson so long after his death. 67 See for example Eliza Haywood’s comment in The Female Spectator, Book viii (1745); in the 1775 edition, volume ii, 78. 68 Garrick’s addition of a confrontation in which Drugger adopts a defiant boxing pose attracted adverse comment: see the unsigned article, ‘Critical Examen of Mr GARRICK’s Abilities as an Actor’, in The Theatrical Review, 1 February 1764, pp. 79–80, and the letter from ‘Rusticus Theatricus’ to The London Evening Post, 10–13 February 1770. 69 The traditional formulas were still useful to the poet of the 1767 Rational Rosciad (No. 157). 70 An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare, p. 13. 71 Steevens (ed.), The Plays of Shakespeare (1778), i, 219–22; Malone (ed.), The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare (1790), i, Part i, 388. 72 i, 277–8 (not printed in No. 176). 73 William Kenrick, A Review of Doctor Johnson’s New Edition of Shakespeare (1765), p. 106. 74 E.A.J.Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries (1982), P. 99. 75 Reed (ed.), The Plays of William Shakespeare (1785), iv, 503, 516; viii, 59. 76 Edward Capell, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare (1783), iii, 479. See No. 156. 77 Ireland is quoted in Schoenbaum, p. 219; Chalmers’s identification of the ‘Poet-Ape’ is in A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers (1799), pp. 240–2. 78 A Complete History of the Stage (1800), iii, 308. Jonson is the subject of chs 5 and 6 of volume iii. 79 Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (1936), pp. 46, 52, 49; A.W.Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature [given 1808], trans. John Black (1815), pp. 282–3. 80 Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. P.P.Howe (1931), vi, 38–9.

28 BEN JONSON

81 In Gilchrist’s An Examination of the Charges Mainteined by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers, and others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity, &c. Towards Shakespeare (1808) and Godwin’s ‘Of Ben Jonson and Milton’s Imitation of that Author’, appended to his Lives of Edward and John Philips, nephews and pupils of Milton (1815). 82 As does the writer in the unsigned review of Gifford’s edition in The Retrospective Review (1820), i, Part ii, pp. 181–200. 83 See the unsigned review of Gifford’s edition in The British Critic (1818), 2nd series, x, 183– 99; John Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, Comedian (1839), i, 97–9 (the passage following No. 175(b), below); and William Bodham Donne, ‘Ben Jonson: His Life and Works’, Bentley’s Quarterly Review (1860), ii, 404–33. 84 Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. Howe, vi, 304. 85 The terms are from John Aikin’s note to ‘Still to be neat, still to be dressed…’ from Epicoene in his anthology Vocal Poetry, or, A Select Collection of English Songs (1810), p. 166. On the treatment of Jonson in nineteenth-century anthologies, see Ian Donaldson, ‘Jonson’s Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H.Morison’, Studies in the Literary Imagination (1973), vi, 139–42. 86 W.C.Roscoe, ‘Ben Jonson’, National Review (1858), vi, 139–47. 87 Tennyson is quoted in Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897), ii, 73. The MS of The Golden Treasury with Tennyson’s notes is in the British Library (Add. MS 42126A, B): for commentary, see B.Ifor Evans, ‘Tennyson and the Origin of the Golden Treasury’, The Times Literary Supplement, 8 December 1932, and Colin J.Horne, ‘Palgrave’s Golden Treasury’, English Studies (1949), n.s. ii, 54–63. 88 See the unsigned review of the editions by Gifford (1816) and Bell (1856) in The British Quarterly Review (1857), xxv, 308–20; William Bodham Donne, ‘Ben Jonson: His Life and Works’, p. 405; and William Harkins, ‘Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’, Cornell Review (1873), i, 141–5. 89 Thomas Carlyle, Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I and Charles I, ed. Alexander Carlyle (1898), p. 74. 90 A Study of Ben Jonson (1889), p. 124. 91 Unsigned article, ‘Academy Portraits. I. —Ben Jonson’, Academy (1896), 1, 390–1; E.K.Chambers, letter, Academy (1896), 1, 432. 92 Unsigned review of Swinburne’s A Study of Ben Jonson, The Athenaeum, 8 March 1890, pp. 315–18. The scenes in question appear in the 1602 version of the play; the evidence for their attribution is discussed in Philip Edwards (ed.), The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (Manchester 1959), pp. lxi–lxvi. 93 See Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, 1808–31, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York 1949), pp. 122–3; Henry Kingsley, ‘Ben Jonson’, Temple Bar (1874), xlii, 35–50. 94 W.W.Greg (ed.), Ben Jonson’s Sad Shepherd with Waldron’s Continuation (Louvain 1905), p. i; G.Gregory Smith, Ben Jonson (1919), pp. 201, 64–5. 95 In The Times Literary Supplement, 13 November 1919, pp. 637–8, and The Athenaeum, 14 November 1919, pp. 1180–1; combined as ‘Ben Jonson’ and published in The Sacred Wood (1920).

1. John Weever, Marston and Jonson 1599

From Epigrammes in the oldest cut, and newest fashion, Sixth Week, no. 11. E.A.J.Honigmann, John Weever (Manchester 1987), p. 91, suggests a date of late 1598 or 1599 for the sonnet. Weever (1575 or 1576–1632) is best known for his references to poetic contemporaries in the Epigrammes (Fourth Week, no. 22 is a sonnet on Shakespeare) and for his 1631 folio, Ancient Funerall Monuments. There is slighting reference to Weever’s epigrams in Jonson’s ‘To my meere English censurer’ (Epig. 18). See Introduction, p. 3, and Nos 4 and 7, below. Ad Io: Marston, & Ben: Iohnson Marston, thy Muse enharbours Horace vaine, Then some Augustus give thee Horace merit, And thine embuskin’d Johnson doth retaine So rich a stile, and wondrous gallant spirit; That if to praise your Muses I desired, My Muse would muse. Such wittes must be admired. (Sig. [F8]v)

30

2. Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour 1599

Printed from the first edition, The Comicall Satyre of Every Man out of his Humor (1600). The play was first performed in 1599. Cordatus (described in the dramatis personae as ‘The Authors friend; A man inly acquainted with the Scope and Drift of his Plot: Of a discreet, and understanding Judgement; and has the place of a Moderator’) and Mitis form the Grex or chorus, commenting on critical issues and explicating the action and characters. The passages from the chorus printed below are those which deal with specific critical issues arising from the action of the play, rather than those which explicate or anticipate it, or discuss drama in general. (a) From the Induction. Mit. You have seene his play Cordatus? pray you; how is’t? Cord. Faith Sir, I must refraine to judge, onely this I can say of it, ’tis strange, and of a perticular kind by it selfe, somewhat like Vetus Comœdia: a worke that hath bounteously pleased me, how it will answere the generall expectation, I know not. Mit. Does he observe all the lawes of Comedie in it? Cord. What lawes meane you? Mit. Why the equall devision of it into Acts and Scenes, according to the Terentian manner, his true number of Actors; the furnishing of the Scene with Grex or Chorus, and that the whole Argument fall within compasse of a daies efficiencie. Cord. O no, these are too nice observations. Mit. They are such as must bee received by your favour, or it cannot be Authentique. Cord. Troth I can discerne no such necessitie. Mit. No? Cord. No, I assure you signior; if those lawes you speake of, had beene delivered us, ab Initio; and in their present vertue and perfection, there had beene some reason of obeying their powers…. (Sig. [Biv]v) [Cordatus then gives a brief history of the development of the classical drama, to show how successive playwrights adapted the forms they inherited.] (b) The chorus following Act I, Scene iii.

32 BEN JONSON

Cord. Now signior, how approve you this? have the Humorists exprest themselves truly or no? Mit. Yes (if it be wel prosecuted) ’tis hitherto happy ynough: but methinks Macilente went hence too soone, he might have been made to stay and speake somewhat in reproofe of Sordido’s wretchednesse, now at the last. Cor. O no, that had bin extreamly improper, besides he had continued the Scene too long with him as’t was, being in no more action. Mit. You may enforce the length as a necessarie reason; but for propriety the Scene wold very wel have born it, in my judgement. Cor. O worst of both; why you mistake his Humor utterly then. Mit. How? do I mistake it? is’t not Envie? Cord. Yes, but you must understand Signior, hee envies him not as he is a villaine, a wolfe i’ the commonwealth, but as he is rich and fortunate; for the true condition of envie, is Dolor aliena felicitatis, to have our eies continually fixt upon another mans prosperitie, that is his cheefe happinesse, and to grieve at that. Whereas if we make his monstrous and abhord actions, our object, the greefe (we take then) comes neerer the nature of Hate than Envie, as being bred out of a kind of contempt and lothing in our selves. Mit. So you’le infer it had been Hate, not Envie in him, to reprehend the humour of Sordido? Cord. Right, for what a man truly envies in another, he could alwaies love, and cherish in himselfe; but no man truly reprehends in another what he loves in himselfe, therefore Reprehension is out of his Hate. And this distinction hath he himselfe made in a speech there (if you markt it) where hee saies, I envie not this Buffon, but I hate him. Mit. Stay sir: I envie not this Buffon, but I hate him; why might he not as well have hated Sordido as him? Cord. No sir, there was subject for his envie in Sordido; his wealth: So was there not in the other, he stood possest of no one eminent gift, but a most odious and fiend-like disposition, that would turne Charitie it selfe into Hate, much more Envie for the present. (Sig. [D iv]r-v) (c) From the chorus following Act II, Scene iii. The act as a whole has displayed the humours of Fastidious Brisk, Carlo Buffone, Sogliardo, Puntarvolo, Sordido, and Fungoso. Mit. Me thinks Cordatus, he dwelt somwhat too long on this Scene; it hung i’the hand. Cord. I see not where he could have insisted lesse, and t’have made the Humors perspicuous enough. Mit. True, as his Subject lies: but he might have altered the shape of Argument, & explicated ‘hem better in single Scenes. Cord. That had been Single indeed: why? be they not the same persons in this, as they would have been in those? and is it not an object of more State, to behold the Scene full, and reliev’d with varietie of Speakers to the end, than to see a vast emptie stage, and the Actors come in (one by one) as if they were dropt down with a feather into the eie of the Audience? Mir. Nay, you are better traded with these things than I, and therefore I’le subscribe to your judgement; mary you shall give me leave to make objections.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 33

Cord. O what else? it’s the speciall intent of the Author you should do so: for thereby others (that are present) may as well be satisfied, who happily would object the same you doe. (Sig. [Fiv.]r-v) (d) From the chorus following Act II, Scene vi. Mit. Well, I doubt this last Scene will endure some grievous Torture. Cord. How? you feare ’twill be rackt by some hard Construction? Mit. Doe not you? Cord. No in good faith: unlesse mine eyes could light mee beyond Sence, I see no reason why this should be more Liable to the Racke than the rest: you’le say perhaps the Cittie will not take it wel, that the Merchant is made here to dote so perfectly upon his wife; and shee againe, to be so Fastidiously affected, as she is? Mit. You have utter’d my thought sir, indeed. Cord. Why (by that proportion) the Court might as well take offence at him we call the Courtier, and with much more Pretext, by how much the place transcends and goes before in dignitie and vertue: but can you imagine that any Noble or true spirit in the Court (whose Sinewie, and altogether unaffected graces, very worthily expresse him a Courtier) will make any exception at the opening of such an emptie Trunk as this Briske is? or thinke his owne worth empeacht by beholding his motley inside? Mit. No Sir, I doe not. Cord. No more, assure you, will any grave wise Cittizen, or modest Matron, take the object of this Follie in Deliro and his Wife; but rather apply it as the foile to their owne vertues: For that were to affirme, that a man writing of Nero, should meane all Emperours: or speaking of Machiavell, comprehend all States-men; or in our Sordido, all Farmars; and so of the rest; than which, nothing can bee utter’d more malicious and absurd. Indeed there are a sort of these narrow-ey’d Decipherers, I confesse, that will extort straunge and abstruse meanings out of any Subject, bee it never so Conspicuous and Innocently delivered. But to such (where e’re they sit conceald) let them know, the Authour defies them, and their writing-Tables; and hopes, no sound or safe judgement will infect it selfe with their contagious Comments, who (indeed) come here only to pervert and poyson the sence of what they heare, and for nought else. (Sig. Hiir-v) (e) The chorus following Act III, Scene vi.

Mit. I travell with another objection Signior, which I feare will be enforc’d against the Author, ere I can be deliver’d of it. Cord. What’s that sir? Mit. That the argument of his Comedie might have ben of some other nature, as of a Duke to be in love with a Countesse, and that Countesse to be in love with the Dukes son, & the son to love the Ladies waiting maid; some such crosse woing, with a Clowne to their servingman, better than to be thus neere and familiarly allied to the time. Cord. You say well, but I would faine hear one of these Autumne—judgements define once, Quid sit Comœdia?1 if he cannot, let him content himselfe with Ciceros definition (till hee have strength to propose to himself a better) who would have a Comedie to be Imitatio vitæ, Speculum Consuetudinis, Imago veritatis,2 a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous, and accommodated to the correction of manners: if the maker have fail’d in

34 BEN JONSON

any particle of this, they may worthily taxe him, but if not, why; be you (that are for them) silent, as I will bee for him; and give way to the Actors. (Sig. Kr) (f) The chorus following Act III, Scene viii. Sordido has resolved to hang himself, because the prognostications of his beloved almanacs have proved false. Cord. How now Mitis? what’s that you consider so seriously? Mit. Troth, that which doth essentially please me: the warping condition of this greene and foggie multitude: but in good faith Signior, your Author hath largely outstript my expectation in this Scene, I will liberally confesse it. For when I saw Sordido so desperately intended, I thought I had had a hand of him then. Cord. What? you suppos’d hee should have hung himselfe indeed? Mit. I did; and had fram’d my objection to it readie, which may yet be very fitly urg’d, & with some necessitie: for though his purpos’d violence lost th’effect, & extended not to death, yet the Intent & Horror of the object was more than the nature of a Comedie will in any sort allow. Cord. I? what thinke you of Plautus in his Comedie called Cistellaria there? where he brings in Alcesimarchus with a drawne sword readie to kill himselfe, and as hee is e’ne fixing his breast upon it, to bee restrain’d from his resolv’d outrage by Silemion and the Bawd: is not his authoritie of power to give our Scene approbation? Mit. Sir, I have this (your only) evasion left mee, to say, I thinke it bee so indeed, your memorie is happier than mine: but I wonder what engine he will use to bring the rest out of their Humors? Cord. That will appeare anone, never preoccupie your imagination withall. Let your mind keepe companie with the Scene stil, which now removes itselfe from the Countrie to the Court. Here comes Macilente and Signior Briske freshly suted, loose not your selfe, for now the Epitasis or busie part of our Subject is in Action. (Sig. Kiiir-v) (g) From the chorus following Act IV, Scene viii. Mit. This Macilente Signior begins to bee more sociable on a suddaine me thinkes, than he was before, there’s some Portent in’t, I beleeve. Cord. O hee’s a fellow of a strange Nature. Now do’s hee (in this calme of his Humor) plot and store up a world of malicious thoughts in his braine, till he is so full with ’hem, that you shall see the very Torrent of his Envie breake forth, and against the course of all their affections oppose it selfe so violently, that you will almost have wonder to thinke how ’tis possible the current of their Dispositions shall receive so quicke and strong an alteration. Mit. I marry sir, this is that on which my Expectation has dwelt all this while: for I must tell you Signior (though I was loth to interrupt the Scene) yet I made it a question in mine owne private discourse, how hee should properly call it, Everie man out of his Humor, when I saw all his Actors so strongly pursue and continue their Humors? Cord. Why therein his Art appeares most full of lustre, and approacheth nearest the life, especially when in the flame and height of their Humors they are laid flat, it fils the eye better, and with more contentment. How tedious a sight were it to behold a prowd exalted tree lopt and cut downe by degrees, when it might be feld in a moment? and to

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 35

set the Axe to it, before it came to that pride and fulnesse, were as not to have it grow. Mit. Well I shall long till I see this fall you talke of. (Sig. Ov) NOTES 1 ‘What is a comedy?’ 2 ‘The imitation of life, the mirror of custom, the image of truth’ (attributed to Cicero by Donatus: Commentum Terenti, ed. Paul Wessner (Stuttgart 1962), i, 22).

36

3. Ben Jonson, prologue to Cynthia’s Revels 1600

From the quarto edition, 1601. The play was acted by the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, at Blackfriars, in 1600. If gratious silence, sweete Attention, Quick sight, and quicker apprehension, (The light of judgments throne) shine any wher; Our doubtful author hopes, this is their Sphære And therefore opens he himselfe to those, To other weaker Beames, his labors close; As loathe to prostitute their virgin straine, To every vulgar, and adulterate braine. In this alone, his Muse her sweetness hath, She shuns the print of any beaten path; And prooves new wayes to come to learned eares: Pied ignorance she neither loves, nor feares. Nor hunts she after popular applause, Or fomy praise, that drops from common Jawes; The garland that she weares, their hands must twine, Who can both censure, understand, define What Merrit is: Then cast those piercing rayes, Round as a crowne, insteed of honor’d Bayes About his Poesie; which (he knowes) affoords, Words above Action: matter, above wordes. (Sig. Br)

38

4. John Weever, Jonson as humorist 1601

From The Whipping of the Satyre (1601), by ‘W.I.’, almost certainly John Weever. For Weever, see No. 1, above. The pamphlet attacks a ‘Satyrist’, an ‘Epigrammatist’, and a ‘Humorist’ for their arrogant and intolerant assaults on contemporary society. The ‘Satyrist’ must be Marston, the ‘Epigrammatist’ is most likely William Guilpin, and the ‘Humorist’ is Jonson: see A. Davenport (ed.), The Whipper Pamphlets (Liverpool 1951), Part i, pp. v–xi. The persona of the poem dreams that he is wandering as a pilgrim in the Holy Land, and comes across the figure of Commonwealth lamenting to her companion Church that she has brought up three ‘That viperlike would eate my bowels out’ (Sig. B4v); they are ‘Sat. rough, severe: Ep. skip-Jacke jester like: /Hu. with newfangled neuterisme enflam’d, /A1 naught’ (Sig. [B5]r) (‘Neuterisme’ refers presumably to the fashionable term ‘humours’ itself). Elsewhere this last figure is addressed as ‘captious Humourist’ (Sig. E2v). The pilgrim offers to ‘correct’ the satirist and to show the other two ‘how lewdly they their time mispent’ (Sig. [B5]v– [B7]r), and the rest of the poem deals with his attempt to do so. (a) From the prefatory Epistle, To the Vayne-Glorious, the Satyrist, Epigrammatist, and Humorist’. Now by your leave, Monsieur Humorist, you that talke of mens humours and dispositions, as though you had bene a Constellation-setter seven yeres in the firmament, or had cast account of every mans nativitie with the starres: but if I were as the Astronomers, I would call you into question for it, seeing you have so abused their Art. But, had you bene but so meane a Philosopher, as have knowne, that mores sequuntur humores,1 you would questionles have made better humours, if it had bene but to better our maners, and not instead of a morall medicine, to have given them a mortall poyson: but I consider of you, as of a yonger brother: you wanted this fame multis nimium; and nulli satis,2 coyne (a goodyere of it) and therefore opus & usus3 put you to such a pinch, that you made sale of your Humours to the Theater and there plaid Pee boh with the people in your humour, then out of your humour. I doe not blame you for this: for though you were guilty of many other things, yet I dare say, you were altogether without guilt at that time, not-withstanding I suppose you would have written for love, and not for money: but I see you are one of those that if a man can finde in his purse to give them presently, they can finde in their hearts to love him everlastingly: for now adaies Aes in præsenti perfectum format amorem.4 But it makes the lesse matter, because I know but few but are corrivals

40 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

with you in the love of silver: so that if the question were asked, Quis amat pecuniam? Experience would answere the voice with a double Eccho, Quisquis.5 And indeed I see no reason, why everie true subject should not love the Q. coyne. (Sigs A3v–[A4]r) (b) From the poem. It seemes your brother Satyre and ye twayne, Plotted three wayes to put the Divell downe; One should outrayle him by invective vaine, One all to flout him like a countrey clowne; And one in action, on a stage out-face, And play upon him to his great disgrace. You Humorist, if it be true I heare, (d) An action thus against the Divell brought, Sending your humours to each Theater, To serve the writ that ye had gotten out. (e) That Mad-cap yet superiour praise doth win, Who out of hope even casts his cap at sin. (d) Against the booke of Humours. (e) Pasquils Mad-cap. Why did ye such unchristian courses take, As lothes the eares of the offended wise? Can ye make sinne against itselfe to make, Or wring the Divell out by his owne vice? It’s past your power, to bring your will to passe, Your vaine attempting, but a tempting was. (Sig [F3v]–F4r) NOTES 1 2 3 4

‘Manners follow humours’. ‘Too much to many…enough to none’. ‘Need and want’. ‘Money in the present forms love in the perfect’ (a parody of the line giving the rule for the present tense of the first conjugation: ‘As in praesenti perfectum format in avi…’: cited in Davenport (ed.), The Whipper Pamphlets, Part i, p. 55). 5 ‘Who loves money? …Anyone’.

5. Nicholas Breton on the satirical fashion 1601

From Breton’s No Whippinge, nor trippinge: but a kinde friendly Snippinge (1601). Breton (?1545–?1626) was the son of a rich London merchant, but after his father’s death his mother married George Gascoigne, who spent most of the family estate. Breton attempted to revive his fortunes through preferment at court and then by numerous publications. Jonson wrote an admiring commendatory verse to his Melancholike humours of 1600 (U.V., 2), but has a dismissive reference to Breton’s (‘Nicholas Pasquill’s’) writings in the ‘Execration upon Vulcan’, l. 77, as has Fletcher in No. 23(d), below. Breton’s Pasquil’s Madcap (1600), a mild verse satire on perennial social corruption, is mentioned in The Whipping of the Satyre (Sig. F3v; see No. 4, above); Breton’s reply in the present pamphlet laments the fashion for satire and poetical backbiting generally. Tis strange to see the humors of these daies: How first the Satyre bites at imperfections: The Epigrammist in his quips displaies A wicked Course in shadowes of corrections: The Humorist hee strictly makes collections Of loth’d behaviours both in youthe and age: And makes them plaie their parts upon a stage. An other Madcappe in a merry fit. For lacke of witte did cast his cappe at sinne: And for his labour was well tould of it, For too much playing on that merry pinne: For that all fishes are not of one sinne: And they that are of cholerick complections, Love not too plain to reade their imperfection Now comes another with a new founde vaine; And onely falls to reprehensions; Who in a kind of scoffing chiding straine, Bringes out I knowe not what in his inventions: But I will ghesse the best of his intencions;

42 BEN JONSON

Hee would that all were well, and so would I. Fooles shuld not too much shew their foolery, And would to God it had ben so indeed, The Satyres teeth had never bitten so: The Epigrammist had not had a feede Of wicked weedes, among his herbes to sowe, Nor one mans humor did not others showe, Nor Madcap had not showen his madness such, And that the whipper had not jerkt so much. (Sig. [A4]r-v)

6. Ben Jonson, Poetaster 1601

From the quarto, Poetaster or the Arraignment (1602). The play was performed in 1601. Horace in the play reflects Jonson’s perception of his own situation in the contemporary literary world, and Horace’s critics Crispinus (the poetaster of the title) and Demetrius stand for Marston and Dekker respectively. See Introduction, PP. 3–5. (a) From Act IV, Scene iii. [Crispinus has had his song ‘Love is blinde, and a wanton’ sung; Tibullus reveals that it was stolen from Horace. Tucca and Demetrius abuse Horace in his absence.] Demet. Alas, sir, Horace? he is a meere spunge; nothing but Humours and Observation; he goes up and down sucking from every societie; and when he comes home, squeazes himselfe dry againe. I knowe him, I. Tuc. Thou sayest true, my poore Poeticall Furie, he will pen all he knowes. A sharpe thorny tooth’d Satyricall Rascall, flye him; He carries Haye in his horne; he will sooner loose his best friend, then his least Jeast. What he once drops upon paper, against a man, lives eternally to upbraide him in the mouth of every slave Tankerd-bearer, or Water-man: not a Baud, or a boy that comes from the bake house, but shall point at him: ’tis all Dogge, and Scorpion; hee carries poyson in his teeth, and a sting in his taile; fough, Bodie of Jove! I’le have the slave whipt one of these daies for his Satyres, and his Humours, by one casheer’d Clarke, or another. Crisp. We’ll undertake him, Captaine. Demet. I, and tickle him i’faith, for his Arrogancie, and his impudence, in commending his owne thinges: and for his translating: I can trace him i’faith: ô, he is the most open fellowe, living; I had as lieve as a newe Suite, I were at it. (Sig. G3v–G4r) (b) From Act V, Scene iii. [Lupus brings an ‘embleme’ of Horace’s to Caesar, claiming it is a libel on the Emperor; this malicious misinterpretation is exposed, and Caesar deputes Virgil to preside at the trial of the charges against Crispinus and Demetrius.]

44 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Tibul. Rufus Laberius Crispinus, and Demetrius Fannius, hold up your hands. You are, before this time, joyntly and severally indited; and here presently to be arraigned, upon the Statute of Calumny, or Lex Remmia (The one by the name of Rufus Laberius Crispinus, alias Crispinas, Poetaster, and Plagiary: the other by the name of Demetrius Fannius, Playdresser & Plagiary) That you (not having the feare of Phœbus or his shafts, before your eyes) contrary to the peace of our liege Lord, Augustus Cæsar, his Crowne and dignitie, and against the forme of a Statute in that case made, and provided; have most ignorantly, foolishly, and (more like your selves) malitiously gone about to deprave, and calumniate the Person and writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, here present, Poet and Priest to the Muses: and to that end have mutually conspir’d, and plotted, at sundry times, as by severall meanes, and in sundry places, for the better accomplishing your base and Envious purpose; taxing him, falsely, of Selfe love, Arrogancy, Impudence, Rayling, filching by Translation, &c. Of all which Calumnies, and every of them in manner and forme aforesaid, what answere you? Are you Guiltie, or not Guilty? (Sig. L3v) [After the judges have been sworn in, Demetrius’ squib against Horace is read out to the court.] Tibul. Our Muse is in minde for th’untrussing a Poet: I slip by his Name; for most men doe know it: A Critick, that al the world bescumbers With Satyricall Humors, and Lyricall Numbers: (Tucca. Art thou there, Boy?) And for the most part, himselfe doth advance With much selfe-love, and more Arrogance: (Tucca. Good: Againe.) And (but that I would not be thought a Prater) I could tell you, he were a Translater. I know the Authors from whence he ha’s stole, And could trace him too, but that I understand ’hem not full and whole. (Tucca. That line is broke loose from all his felowes; chaine him up shorter, doe.) The best note I can give you to knowe him by, Is, that he keepes Gallants company; Whome I would wish, in time should him feare, Least after they buy Repentance too deare. Subscri, De. Fannius. Tuc. Well said. This carries Palme with it. Horace. And why, thou Motley Gull? why should they feare? When hast thou knowne us wrong, or taxe a Friend? I dare thy malice, to betray it. Speake. Now thou curlst up, thou poore and nasty Snake; And shrinkst thy poysnous head into thy Bosome: Out Viper; thou that eat’st thy Parents, hence. Rather, such speckled Creatures, as thy selfe, Should be eschew’d, and shund: such, as will bite And gnaw their absent Friends, not cure their Fame; Catch at the loosest Laughters, and affect

BEN JONSON 45

To be thought Jesters; such, as can devise Things never scene, or heard, t’impayre mens Names, And gratifie their credulous Adversaries; Will carry Tales; doe basest offices; Cherish divided Fiers; and increase New Flames, out of old Embers; will reveale Each secret that’s committed to their Trust: These be blacke Slaves; Romanes, take heede of these. Tucca. Thou twangst right, little Horace; they be indeed: A couple of Chap-falne Curres. Come, Wee of the Bench, Let’s rise to the Urne, and condemne ’hem, quickly. Virgill. Before you goe together (worthy Romanes) We are to tender our Opinion; And give you those Instructions, that may adde Unto your even Judgement in the Cause; Which thus we doe Commence: First, you must know That where there is a true, and perfect Merit, There can be no Dejection; and the Scorne Of humble Basenesse, oftentimes, so workes In a high Soule upon the grosser Spirit; That to his bleared, and offended Sense, There seemes a hideous Fault blaz’d in the Object; When only the Disease is in his Eyes. Here-hence it comes, our Horace now stands taxt Of Impudence, Selfe-love, and Arrogance, By these, who share no merit in themselves; And therefore, thinke his Portion is as small. For they, from their owne guilt, assure their Soules, If they should confidently praise their workes, In them it would appeare Inflation; Which, in a full, and well-digested man, Cannot receive that foule abusive name, But the faire Title of Erection. And, for his trewe use of translating Men, It still hath beene a worke of as much Palme In clearest Judgements, as t’invent, or make. His sharpnesse, that is most excusable; As being forc’t out of a suffering Vertue, Oppressed with the Licence of the Time: And howsoever Fooles, or Jerking Pedants, Players, or such like Buffonary wits, May with their beggerly, and barren trash, Tickle base vulgar eares, in their despight; This (like Joves Thunder) shall their pride controule. ‘The honest Satyre hath the happiest Soule.’ Now, Romanes, you have heard our thoughts. Withdrawe, when you please. (Sig. L4v– Mv)

46 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

⋆⋆⋆ [The accused are found guilty. Virgil asks what cause they had to malign Horace.] Demet. In troth, no great cause, not I; I must confesse: but that he kept better companie (for the most part) then I: and that better Men lov’d him, then lov’d me: and that his writings thriv’d better then mine, and were better lik’t & grac’t: Nothing else. Virg. Thus, envious Soules repine at others good. Hor. If this be all; faith, I forgive thee freely. Envie me still; so long as Virgill loves me, Gallus, Tibullus, and the best-best Cæsar, My deare Mecœnas; while these, with many more (Whose names I wisely slip) shall think me worthy Their honour’d and ador’d Society, And read, and love, proove, and applaud my Poemes; I would not wish but such as you should spight them. (Sig. M2v–M3r) (c) From the ‘apologeticall Dialogue’ printed with the play in the 1616 Workes. TO THE READER.

IF, by looking on what is past, thou hast deserv’d that name, I am willing thou should’st yet know more, by that which followes; an apologeticall Dialogue: which was only once spoken upon the stage, and all the answere I ever gave, to sundry impotent libells then cast out (and some yet remayning) against me, and this Play. Wherein I take no pleasure to revive the times, but that Posteritie may make a difference, betweene their manners that provok’d me then, and mine that neglected them ever. For, in these strifes, and on such persons, were as wretched to affect a victorie, as it is unhappy to be committed with them. Non annorum canicies est laudanda, sed morum.1 (348) [Nasutus and Polyposus go to visit ‘The Author’, and find him scornful of his critics, and refusing to defend his play in public.] NAS. I never saw this play bred all this tumult. What was there in it could so deeply offend? And stirre so many hornets? AUT. Shall I tell you? NAS. Yes, and ingenuously. AUT. Then, by the hope, Which I preferre unto all other objects, I can professe, I never writ that peece More innocent, or empty of offence. Some salt it had, but neyther tooth, nor gall, Nor was there in it any circumstance, Which, in the setting downe, I could suspect Might be perverted by an enemies tongue. Onely, it had the fault to be call’d mine. That was the crime. POL. No? why they, say you tax’d The Law, and Lawyers; Captaines; and the Players

BEN JONSON 47

By their particular names. AUT. It is not so. I us’d no name. My Bookes have still beene taught To spare the persons, and to speake the vices. These are meere slanders, and enforc’d by such As have no safer wayes to mens disgraces, But their owne lyes, and losse of honesty. Fellowes of practis’d, and most laxative tongues, Whose empty and eager bellies, i’ the yeere, Compell their braynes to many desp’rate shifts, (I spare to name ’hem: for, their wretchednesse, Fury it selfe would pardon.) These, or such Whether of malice, or of ignorance, Or itch, t’have me their adversary (I know not) Or all these mixt; but sure I am, three yeeres. They did provoke me with their petulant stiles On every stage: And I at last, unwilling, But weary, I confesse, of so much trouble, Thought, I would try, if shame could winne upon ’hem. And therefore chose AUGUSTUS CÆSARS times, When wit, and artes were at their height in Rome, To shew that VIRGIL, HORACE, and the rest Of those great master-spirits did not want Detractors, then, or practisers against them: And by this line (although no paralel) I hop’d at last they would sit downe, and blush. But nothing could I finde more contrary. And though the impudence of flyes be great, Yet this hath so provok’d the angry waspes, Or as you sayd, of the next nest, the hornets; That they fly buzzing, mad, about my nostrills: And like so many screaming grasse-hoppers, Held by the wings, fill every eare with noyse. And what? those former calumnies you mention’d. First, of the Law. Indeed, I brought in OVID, Chid by his angry father, for neglecting The study of their lawes, for poetry: And I am warranted by his owne words. Sape pater dixit, studium quid inutile tentas? Mæonides nullas ipse reliquit opes.2 And in farre harsher terms elsewhere, as these: Non me verbosas leges ediscere, non me Ingrato voces prostituisse foro.3 But how this should relate, unto our lawes, Or their just ministers, with least abuse, I reverence both too much, to understand! Then, for the Captaine; I will onely speake An Epigramme I here have made: It is Unto true Souldiers. That’s the lemma. Marke it.

48 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

[Quotes Epig. 108, ‘To True Soldiers’.] Now, for the Players, it is true, I tax’d ’hem, And yet, but some; and those so sparingly, As all the rest might have sate still, unquestion’d, Had they but had the wit, or conscience, To thinke well of themselves. But, impotent they Thought each mans vice belong’d to their whole tribe: And much good doo’t ’hem. What th’ have done ’gainst me, I am not mov’d with. If it gave ’hem meat, Or got ’hem clothes. ’Tis well. That was their end. Onely amongst them, I am sorry for Some better natures, by the rest so drawne, To run in that vile line. POL. And is this all? Will you not answere then the libells? AUT. No. POL. Nor the untrussers? AUT. Neither. POL. Y’are undone then. AU. With whom? POL. The world. AU. The baud! POL. It will be taken To be stupidity, or tamenesse in you. ⋆⋆⋆ POL. O, but they lay particular imputations— AUT. As what? POL. That all your writing, is meere rayling. AUT. Ha! If all the salt in the old comœdy Should be so censur’d, or the sharper wit Of the bold satyre, termed scolding rage, What age could then compare with those, for buffons? What should be sayd of ARISTOPHANES? PERSIUS? or JUVENAL? whose names we now So glorifie in schooles, at least pretend it. Ha’ they no other? POL. Yes: they say you are slow, And scarse bring forth a play a yeere. AUT. ’Tis true. I would, they could not say that I did that, There’s all the joy that I take i’ their trade, Unlesse such Scribes as they might be proscrib’d Th’ abused theaters. They would thinke it strange, now, A man should take but colts-foote, for one day, And, betweene whiles, spit out a better poeme Then e’re the master of art, or giver of wit, Their belly made. Yet, this is possible, If a free minde had but the patience, To think so much, together, and so vile. But, that these base, and beggerly conceipts Should carry it, by the multitude of voices, Against the most abstracted worke, oppos’d To the stuff’d nostrills of the drunken rout! O, this would make a learn’d, and liberal! soule,

BEN JONSON 49

To rive his stayned quill, up to the back, And damne his long-watch’d labours to the fire; Things, that were borne, when none but the still night, And his dumbe candle saw his pinching throes: Were not his owne free merit a more crowne Unto his travailes, then their reeling claps. This ’tis, that strikes me silent, seales my lips, And apts me, rather to sleepe out my time, Then I would waste it in contemned strifes, With these vile Ibides, these uncleane birds, That make their mouthes their clysters, and still purge From their hot entrailes. But, I leave the monsters To their owne fate. And, since the Comick MUSE Hath prov’d so ominous to me, I will trie If Tragœdie have a more kind aspect. Her favours in my next I will pursue, Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one, So he judicious be; He shall b’ alone A Theatre unto me: Once, I’le say, To strike the eare of time, in those fresh straines, As shall, beside the cunning of their ground, Give cause to some of wonder, some despight, And unto more, despaire, to imitate their sound. I, that spend halfe my nights, and all my dayes, Here in a cell, to get a darke, pale face, To come forth worth the ivy, or the bayes, And in this age can hope no other grace— Leave me. There’s something come into my thought, That must, and shall be sung, high, and aloofe, Safe from the wolves black jaw, and the dull asses hoofe. NASU. I reverence these raptures, and obey ’hem. (350–3) NOTES 1 ‘Old age is truly venerable when it grows hoary not with grey hairs but with good deeds’: St Ambrose, Letters, 16; trans. Sister Mary Melchior Beyenka (Washington 1954), p. 69. 2 ‘Often my father said, “Why do you try a profitless pursuit? Even the Maeonian left no wealth”’: Ovid, Tristia, 4.10.21–2. 3 ‘Not to learn by heart wordy laws nor to prostitute my voice in the ungrateful Forum’: Ovid, Amores, 1.15.5–6; Ovid’s Amores Book One, trans. John A.Barsby (Oxford 1973), p. 156, adapted.

50

7. Thomas Dekker, Horace untrussed 1601–2

From Satiro-mastix. OR The untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602). Dekker’s reply to Poetaster must have been staged in the autumn of 1601; it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 11 November 1601. Grafted onto a play about William Rufus and Caelestine, daughter of Sir Quintilian Shorthose, who is to be married on the day the action takes place to Sir Walter Terril, is an attack on the Horace of Poetaster for his satirical activities. In the end Horace is forced to take an oath forswearing his self-promoting, self-aggrandizing, and double-dealing activities in tavern, theatre, and town generally. See Introduction, pp. 3–5. (a) From the preface, ‘To the World’. Dekker’s account of the stage-quarrel. World, I was once resolv’d to bee round with thee, because I know tis thy fashion to bee round with every bodie: but the winde shifting his point, the Veine turn’d: yet because thou wilt sit as Judge of all matters (though for thy labour thou wear’st Midasses eares, and art Monstrum horrendum, informe: Ingens cui lumen ademptum;1 whose great Poliphemian eye is put out) I care not much if I make description (before thy Universality) of that terrible Poetomachia, lately commenc’d betweene Horace the second, and a band of leane-witted Poetasters. They have bin at high wordes, and so high, that the ground could not serve them, but (for want of Chopins) have stalk’d upon Stages. Horace hal’d his Poetasters to the Barre, the Poetasters untruss’d Horace: how worthily eyther, or how wrongfully, (World) leave it to the Jurie: Horace (questionles) made himself beleeve, that his Burgonian wit might desperately challenge all commers, and that none durst take up the foyles against him: It’s likely, if he had not so beleiv’d, he had not bin so deceiv’d, for hee was answer’d at his owne weapon: And if before Apollo himselfe (who is Coronator Poetarum) an Inquisition should be taken touching this lamentable merry murdering of Innocent Poetry: all mount Helicon to Bun-hill it would be found on the Poetasters side Se defendendo. Notwithstanding the Doctors thinke otherwise. I meete one, and he runnes full Butt at me with his Satires hornes, for that in untrussing Horace, I did onely whip his fortunes, and condition of life, where the more noble Reprehension had bin of his mindes Deformitie, whose greatnes if his Criticall Lynx had with as narrow eyes, observ’d in himselfe, as it did little spots upon others, without all disputation, Horace would not have left Horace out of Every man in’s Humour. His fortunes? why does not he taxe that onely in others? read his Arraignement and see. A second Cat-a-mountaine mewes, and calls me Barren, because my braines could bring foorth no other Stigmaticke than Tucca, whome Horace had put to making, and begot to my hand; but I wonder what language Tucca would have

52 BEN JONSON

spoke, if honest Capten Hannam had bin borne without a tongue? Ist not as lawfull then for mee to imitate Horace, as Horace Hannam? Besides, If I had made an opposition of any other newminted fellow, (of what Test so ever) hee had bin out-fac’d, and out-weyed by a settled former approbation; neyther was it much improper to set the same dog upon Horace, whom Horace had set to worrie others. (Sig. A33–[A4]r) (b) From Act I, Scene ii.

[Horace’s style of composing, his complacency aired to his foolish follower Asinius Bubo (possibly a caricature of John Weever: see Honigmann, John Weever, pp. 42–9), reproaches from Crispinus and Demetrius (Marston and Dekker), a quarrel with Tucca.] Horrace sitting in a study behinde a Curtaine, a candle by him burning, bookes lying confusedly: to himselfe. Hor. To thee whose fore-head swels with Roses, Whose most haunted bower Gives life & sent to every flower, Whose most adored name incloses, Things abstruse, deep and divine, Whose yellow tresses shine, Bright as Eoan fire. O me thy Priest inspire. For I to thee and thine immortall name, In—in—in golden tunes, For I to thee and thine immortall name— In—sacred raptures flowing, flowing, swimming, swimming: In sacred raptures swimming. Immortall name, game, dame, tame, lame, lame, lame, Pux, hath, shame, proclaime, oh— In Sacred raptures flowing, will proclaime, not— O me thy Priest inspyre! For I to thee and thine immortall name, In flowing numbers fild with spright and flame, Good, good, in flowing numbers fild with spright & flame. Enter Asinius Bubo.

Asini. Horace, Horace, my sweet ningle, is alwayes in labour when I come, the nine Muses be his midwives I pray Jupiter: Ningle. Hor. In flowing numbers fild with sprite and flame, To thee. Asini. To me? I pledge thee sweet Ningle, by Bacchus quaffing boule, I thought th’adst drunke to me. Hor. It must have been in the devine lycour of Pernassus, then in which, I know you would scarce have pledg’d me, but come sweet roague, sit, sit, sit. Asini. Over head and eares yfaith? I have a sacke-full of newes for thee, thou shall plague some of them, if God send us life and health together. Hor. Its no matter, empty thy sacke anon, but come here first honest roague, come. Asini. Ist good, Ist good, pure Helicon ha?

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 53

Hor. Dam me ift be not the best that ever came from me, if I have any judgement looke sir, tis an Epithalamium for Sir Walter Terrels wedding, my braines have given assault to it but this morning. Asin. Then I hope to see them flye out like gun-powder ere night. Hor. Nay good roague marke, for they are the best lynes that ever I drew. Asin. Heer’s the best leafe in England, but on, on, Ile but tune this Pipe. Hor. Marke, to thee whose fore-head swels with Roses. Asin. O sweet, but there will be no exceptions taken, because fore-head and swelling comes together? Hor. Push, away, away, its proper, besides tis an elegancy to say the fore head swels. Asin. Nay an’t be proper, let it stand for Gods love. Hor. Whose most haunted bower, Gives life and sent to every flower. Whose most adored name incloses, Things abstruse, deep and divine. Whose yellow tresses shine, Bright as Eoan fire. Asini. O pure, rich, ther’s heate in this, on, on. Hor. Bright as Eoan fire, O me thy Priest inspire! For I to thee and thine immortall name—marke this. In flowing numbers fild with spryte and flame. Asini. I mary, ther’s spryte and flame in this. Hor. A pox, a this Tobacco. Asin. Wod this case were my last if I did not marke, nay all’s one, I have always a consort of Pypes about me, myne Ingle is all fire and water; I markt, by this Candle (which is none of Gods Angels) I remember, you started back at sprite and flame. Hor. For I to thee and thine immortall name, In flowing numbers fild with sprite and flame, To thee Loves mightiest King, Himen Ô Himen does our chaste Muse sing. Asin. Ther’s musicke in this; Hor. Marke now deare Asinius. Let these virgins quickly see thee, Leading out the Bride, Though theyr blushing cheekes they hide, Yet with kisses will they fee thee, To untye theyr Virgin zone, They grieve to lye alone. Asini. So doe I by Venus. Hor. Yet with kisses wil they see thee, my Muse has marcht (deare roague) no farder yet: but how ist? how ist? nay prethee good Asinius deale plainly, doe not flatter me, come, how? — Asin. If I have any judgement: Hor. Nay look you Sir, and then follow a troope of other rich and labour’d conceipts, oh the end shall be admirable! but how ist sweet Bubo, how, how! Asini. If I have any Judgement, tis the best stuffe that ever dropt from thee. Hor. You ha scene my Acrosticks?

54 BEN JONSON

Asi. Ile put up my pypes and then Ile see any thing. Hor. Th’ast a Coppy of mine Odes to, hast not Bubo? Asi. Your odes? O that which you spake by word a mouth at the’ ordinary, when Musco the gull cryed Mew at it: Hor. A pox on him poore braineles Rooke: and you remember, I tolde him his wit lay at pawne with his new Sattin sute, and both would be lost, for not fetching home by a day. Asi. At which he would faine ha blusht but that his painted cheekes would not let him. Hor. Nay sirra the Palinode, which I meane to stitch to my Revels, shall be the best and ingenious peece that ever I swet for…. ⋆⋆⋆ …but honest roague, come, what news, what newes abroad? I have heard a the horses walking a’th top of Paules. Asi. Ha ye? why then Captain Tucca rayles upon you most preposterously behinde your backe, did you not heare him? Ho. A pox upon him: by the white & soft hand of Minerva, Ile make him the most ridiculous: dam me if I bring not’s humor ath stage: &—scurvy lymping tongu’d captaine, poor greasie buffe Jerkin, hang him: tis out of his Element to traduce me: I am too well ranckt Asinius to bee stab’d with his dudgion wit: sirra, Ile compose an Epigram upon him, shall goe thus— Asi. Nay I ha more news, ther’s Crispinus & his Jorneyman Poet Demetrius Faninus too, they sweare they’ll bring your life & death upon’th stage like a Bricklayer in a play. Hor. Bubo they must presse more valiant wits than theyr own to do it: me ath stage? ha, ha, Ile starte thence poor copper-lace workmasters, that dare play me: I can bring (& that they quake at) a prepar’d troope of gallants, who for my sake shal distaste every unsalted line, in their fly-blowne Comedies. Asi. Nay that’s certaine, ile bring 100 gallants of my ranke. Hor. That same Crispinus is the silliest Dor, and Faninus the slightest cob-web-lawne peece of a Poet, oh God! Why should I care what every Dor doth buz Incredulous eares, it is a crowne to me, That the best judgements can report me wrong’d. Asi. I am one of them that can report it: Hor. I thinke but what they are, and am not moov’d. The one a light voluptuous Reveler, The other, a strange arrogating puffe, Both impudent, and arrogant enough. Asin. S’lid do not Criticus Revel in these lynes, ha Ningle ha? [Knocking] Hor. Yes, they’re mine owne. ⋆⋆⋆ [Crispinus and Demetrius enter and ask Asinius to read a book and leave them in peace with Horace.]

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 55

Hor. To see my fate, that when I dip my pen In distilde Roses, and doe strive to dreine, Out of myne Inke all gall; that when I wey Each sillable I write or speake, because Mine enemies with sharpe and searching eyes Look through & through me, carving my poore labours Like an Anotomy: Oh heavens to see, That when my lines are measur’d out as straight As even Paralels, tis strange that still, Still some imagine they are drawne awry. The error is not mine, but in theyr eye, That cannot take proportions. Cris. Horrace, Horrace, To stand within the shot of galling tongues, Proves not your gilt, for could we write on paper, Made of these turning leaves of heaven, the cloudes, Or speake with Angels tongues: yet wise men know, That some would shake the head, tho Saints should sing, Some snakes must hisse, because they’re borne with stings. Hor. Tis true. Cris. Doe we not see fooles laugh at heaven? and mocke The Makers workmanship; be not you griev’d If that which you molde faire, upright and smooth, Be skewd awry, made crooked, lame and vile, By racking coments, and calumnious tongues, So to be bit it ranckles not: for innocence May with a feather brush off the foulest wrongs. But when your dastard wit will strike at men In corners, and in riddles folde the vices Of your best friends, you must not take to heart, If they take off all gilding from their pilles, And onely offer you the bitter Coare. Hor. Crispinus. Cri. Say that you have not sworne unto your Paper, To blot her white cheekes with her dregs and bottome Of your friends private vices: say you sweare Your love and your aleageance to bright vertue Makes you descend so low, as to put on The Office of an Executioner, Onely to strike off the head of sinne, Where ere you finde it standing, Say you sweare; And make damnation parcell of your oath, That when your lashing jestes make all men bleed; Yet you whip none. Court, Citty, country, friends, Foes, all must smart alike; yet Court, nor Citty, Nor foe, nor friend, dare winch at you; great pitty. Dem. If you sweare, dam me Faninus, or Crispinus,

56 BEN JONSON

Or to the law (Our kingdomes golden chaine) To Poets dam me, or to Players dam me, If I brand you, or you, tax you, scourge you: I wonder then, that of five hundred, foure hundred five, Should all point with their fingers in one instant At one and the same man? Hor. Deare Faninus. Dem. Come, you cannot excuse it. Hor. Heare me, I can— Dem. You must daube on thicke collours then to hide it. Cris. We come like your Phisitions, to purge Your sicke and daungerous minde of her disease. Dem. In troth we doe, out of our loves we come, And not revenge, but if you strike us still, We must defend our reputations: Our pens shall like our swords be alwayes sheath’d, Unlesse too much provockt, Horace if then They draw bloud of you, blame us not, we are men: Come, let thy Muse beare up a smoother sayle, Tis the easiest and the basest Arte to raile. Hor. Deliver me your hands. I love you both, As deare as my owne soule, proove me, and when I shall traduce you, make me the scorne of men. Both. Enough, we are friends. ⋆⋆⋆ [After an exchange about Asinius’ book.] Enter Blunt and Tucca. Blun. Wher’s this gallant? Morrow Gentlemen: what’s this devise done yet Horace? Hor. Gods so, what meane you to let this fellow dog you into my Chamber? Blun. Oh, our honest Captayne, come, prethee let us see. Tuc. Why you bastards of nine whoores, the Muses, why doe you walk heere in this gorgeous gailery of gallant inventions, with that whooreson poore lyme & hayrerascall? why— Cris. O peace good Tucca, we are all sworne friends, Tuc. Sworne, that Judas yonder that walkes in rug, will dub you Knights ath Poste, if you serve under his band of oaths, the copper-fact rascal wil for a good supper out sweare twelve dozen of graund Juryes. Blun. A pox ont, not done yet, and bin about it three dayes? Hor. By Jesu within this houre, save you Captayne Tucca. Tuc. Dam thee, thou thin bearded Hermaphrodite, dam thee, Ile save my selfe for one I warrant thee, is this thy Tub Diogines? Hor. Yes Captaine this is my poore lodging. Asin. Morrow Captaine Tucca, will you whiffe this morning?

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 57

Tuc. Art thou there goates pizzel; no godamercy Caine I am for no whiffs I, come hether sheep-skin-weaver, s’foote thou lookst as thou th’adst beg’d out of a Jayle: drawe, I meane not thy face (for tis not worth drawing) but drawe neere: this way, martch, follow your commaunder you scoundrell: So, thou must run of an errand for mee Mephostophiles. Hor. To doe you pleasure Captayne I will, but whether? Tuc. To hell, thou knowst the way, to hell my fire and brimstone, to hell; dost stare my Sarsens-head at Newgate? dost gloate? Ile march through thy dunkirkes guts, for shooting jestes at me. Hor. Deare Captaine but one word. Tuc. Out bench-whistler out, ile not take thy word for a dagger Pye: you browne-breadmouth stinker, ile teach thee to turne me into Bankes his horse, and to tell gentlemen I am a Jugler, and can shew trickes. Hor. Captaine Tucca, but halfe a word in your eare. Tuc. No you starv’d rascal, thou’t bite off mine eares then, you must have three or foure suites of names, when like a lowsie Pediculous vermin th’ast but one suite to thy backe: you must be call’d Asper, and Criticus, and Horace, thy tytle’s longer a reading then the Stile a the big Turkes: Asper, Criticus, Quintus, Horatius, Flaccus. Hor. Captaine I know upon what even bases I stand, and therefore— Tuc. Bases? wud the roague were but ready for me. Blun. Nay prethee deare Tucca, come you shall shake— Tuc. Not hands with great Hunkes there, not hands, but Ile shake the gull-groper out of his tan’d skinne. Crisp. & Deme. For our sake Captaine, nay prethee holde. Tuc. Thou wrongst heere a good honest rascall Crispinus, and a poore varlet Demetrius Fanninus (bretheren in thine owne trade of Poetry) thou sayst Crispinus Sattin dublet is Reavel’d out heere, and that this penurious sneaker is out at elboes, goe two my good full mouth’d ban-dog, Ile ha thee friends with both. Hor. With all my heart captaine Tucca, and with you too, Ile laye my handes under your feete, to keepe them from aking. Omnes. Can you have any more? Tuc. Saist thou me so, olde Coale? come doo’t then; yet tis no matter neither, Ile have thee in league first with these two rowly powlies: they shall be thy Damons and thou their Pithyasse: Crispinus shall give thee an olde cast Sattin suite, and Demetrius shall write thee a Scene or two, in one of thy strong garlicke Comedies; and thou shall take the guilt of conscience for’t, and sweare tis thine owne olde lad, tis thine owner thou never yet fels’t into the hands of sattin, didst? Hor. Never Captaine I thanke God. Tuc. Goe too, thou shalt now King Gorboduck, thou shalt, because Ile ha thee damn’d, Ile ha thee all in Sattin: Asper, Criticus, Quintus, Horatius, Flaccus, Crispinus shal doo’t, thou shalt doo’t, heyre apparant of Helicon, thou shalt doo’t. Asi. Mine Ingle weare an olde cast Sattin suite? Tuc. I wafer-face your Ningle. Asi. If he carry the minde of a Gentleman, he’ll scorne it at’s heeles. Tuc. Mary muffe, my man a ginger-bread, wilt eate any small coale? Asi. No Captaine, wod you should well know it, great coale shall not fill my bellie. Tuc. Scorne it, dost scorne to be arrested at one of his olde Suites? Hor. No Captaine, Ile weare anything.

58 BEN JONSON

Tuc. I know thou wilt, I know th’art an honest low minded Pigmey, for I ha scene thy shoulders lapt in a Plaiers old cast Cloake, like a Slie knave as thou art: and when thou ranst mad for the death of Horatio2: thou borrowedst a gowne of Roscius the Stager, (that honest Nicodemus) and sentst it home lowsie, didst not? Responde, didst not? Blun. So so, no more of this, within this houre— Hor. If I can sound retreate to my wits, with whome this leader is in skirmish, Ile end within this houre. Tuc. What wut end? wut hang thy selfe now? has he not writ Finis yet Jacke? what will he bee fifteene weekes about this Cockatrices egge too? has hee not cackeld yet? not laide yet? Blunt. Not yet, hee sweares hee will within this houre. Tuc. His wittes are somewhat hard bound: the Puncke his Muse has sore labour ere the whoore bee delivered: the poore saffron-cheeke Sun-burnt Gipsie wantes Phisicke; give the hungrie-face pudding-pye-eater ten Pilles: ten shillings my faire Angelica, they’l make his Muse as yare as a tumbler. Blu. He shall not want for money if heele write. Tuc. Goe by Jeronimo, goe by; and heere, drop the ten shillings into this Bason; doe, drop, when Jacke? hee shall call me his Mœcenas: besides, Ile dam up’s Oven-mouth for rayling at’s: So, ist right Jacke? ist sterling? fall off now to the vanward of yonder foure Stinkers, and aske alowde if wee shall goe? the Knight shall defray Jacke, the Knight when it comes to Summa totalis, the Knyght, the Knight. —(Sig. [B4]r–D2r) (c) From Act II, Scene ii.

[Horace, having had Asinius Bubo distribute satirical epigrams against Tucca and having cast slurs on the literary efforts of Crispinus and Demetrius, gives his creed as a satirist.] Hor. The Muses birdes the Bees were hiv’d and fled, Us in our cradle, thereby prophecying; That we to learned eares should sweetly sing, But to the vulger and adulterate braine, Should loath to prostitute our Virgin straine. No, our sharpe pen shall keep the world in awe, Horace thy Poesie, wormwood wreathes shall weare, We hunt not for mens loves but for their feare. Exit (Sig. E3v) (d) From Act, IV, Scene i.

[Tucca bids Horace remember his time as a journeyman actor; Sir Vaughan is also present.] Tucca …thou hast been at Parris garden hast not? Hor. Yes Captaine, I ha plaide Zulziman3 there. Sir Vau. Then M.Horace you plaide the part of an honest man. Tuc. Death of Hercules, he could never play that part well in’s life, no Fulkes you could not: thou call’st Demetrius Jorneyman Poet, but thou putst up a Supplication to be a poore Jorneyman Player, and hadst beene still so, but that thou couldst not set a good

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 59

face upon’t: thou hast forgot how thou amblest (in leather pilch) by a play-wagon, in the high way, and took’st mad Jeronimoes part, to get service among the Mimickes: and when the Stagerites banisht thee into the Ile of Dogs, thou turn’dst Ban-dog (villanous Guy) & ever since bitest therefore I aske if th’ast been at Parris-garden, because thou hast such a good mouth; thou baitst well, read, lege, save thy selfe and read. (Sig. G3v–[G4r]) (e) From Act IV, Scene ii.

[Tucca challenges Horace, accuses him of satirizing friends and patrons indiscriminately. Horace recants but vows poetic revenge on him.] Boy. Capten, Capten, Horace stands sneaking heere. Tuc. I smelt the foule-fisted Morter–treader, come my most damnable fastidious rascall, I have a suite to both of you. Asi. O holde, most pittifull Captaine holde. Hor. Holde Capten, tis knowne that Horace is valliant, & a man of the sword. Tuc. A Gentleman or an honest Cittizen, shall not Sit in your pennie-bench Theaters, with his Squirrell by his side cracking nuttes; nor sneake into a Taverne with his Mermaid; but he shall be Satyr’d, and Epigram’d upon, and his humour must run upo’th Stage: you’ll ha Every Gentleman in’s humour, and Every Gentleman out on’s humour: wee that are heades of Legions and Bandes, and feare none but these same shoulder-clappers, shall feare you, you Serpentine rascall. Hor. Honour’d Capten. Tuc. Art not famous enough yet, my mad Horastratus, for killing a Player, but thou must eate men alive? thy friends? Sirra wilde-man, thy Patrons? thou Anthropophagite, thy Mecenæsses? Hor. Captaine, I’m sorry that you lay this wrong. So close unto your heart: deare Captaine thinke I writ out of hot blood, which (now) being colde, I could be pleas’d (to please you) to quaffe downe, The poyson’d Inke, in which I dipt your name. Tuc. Saist thou so, my Palinodicall rimester? Hor. Hence forth Ile rather breath out Solœcismes (To doe which Ide as soone speake blasphemie) Than with my tongue or pen to wound your worth, Beleeve it noble Capten; it to me Shall be a Crowne, to crowne your actes with praize, Out of your hate, your love Ile stronglie raize. Tuc. I know th’ast a number of these Quiddits to binde men to’th peace: tis thy fashion to flirt Inke in everie mans face; and then to craule into his bosome, and damne thy selfe to wip’t off agen: yet to give out abroad, that hee was glad to come to composition with thee: I know Monsieur Machiavell tis one a thy rules; My long-heel’d Troglodite, I could make thine eares burne now, by dropping into them, all those hot oathes, to which, thy selfe gav’st voluntarie fire, (when thou wast the man in the Moone) that thou wouldst never squib out any new Salt-peter Jestes against honest Tucca, nor those Maligo-tasters, his Poetasters; I could Cinocephalus, but I will not, yet thou knowst thou hast broke those oathes in print, my excellent infernall. Hor. Capten.

60 BEN JONSON

Tuc. Nay I smell what breath is to come from thee, thy answer is, that there’s no faith to be helde with Heritickes & Infidels, and therfore thou swear’st anie thing: but come, lend mee thy hand, thou and I hence forth will bee Alexander and Lodwicke, the Gemini: sworne brothers, thou shall be Perithous and Tucca Theseus; but Ile leave thee i’th lurch, when thou mak’st thy voiage into hell: till then, Thine-assuredly. Hor. With all my soule deare Capten. Tuc. Thou’lt shoote thy quilles at mee, when my terrible backe’s turn’d for all this, wilt not Porcupine? and bring me and my Heliconistes into thy Dialogues to make us talke madlie, wut not Lucian? Hor. Capten, if I doe— Tuc. Nay and if thou dost, hornes of Lucifer, the Parcell-Poets shall Sue thy wrangling Muse, in the Court of Pernassus, and never leave hunting her, till she plead in Forma Pauperis: but I hope th’ast more grace: come: friendes, clap handes tis a bargaine; amiable Bubo, thy fist must walke too: so, I love thee, now I see th’art a little Hercules, and wilt fight; Ile Sticke thee now in my companie like a sprig of Rosemary. ⋆⋆⋆ [When left alone at the end of the scene Horace is less repentant.] Hor. … Well, we will goe, And see what weapons theyr weake wittes doe bring; If sharpe, we’ll spred a large and nobler wing; Tucca, heere lyes thy Peace; warre roares agen; My Swoord shall never cutte thee, but my pen. Exit. (Sig. H2r–[H4]r) (f) From Act IV, Scene iii.

[Tucca’s charges against Horace; Demetrius and Crispinus defend the motives of Horace’s enemies.] Sir Va. Two urds Horace about your eares: how chance it passes, that you bid God boygh to an honest trade of building Symneys, and laying downe Brickes, for a worse handicraftnes, to make nothing but railes; your Muse leanes upon nothing but filthy rotten railes, such as stand on Poules head, how chance? Hor. Sir Vaughan. Sir Va. You lye sir varlet sir villaine, I am sir Salamanders, ounds, is my man Master Peter Salamanders face as urse as mine? Sentlemen, all and Ladies, and you say once or twice Amen, I will lap this little Silde, this Booby in his blankets agen. Omnes. Agree’d, agree’d. Tuc. A blanket, these crackt Venice glasses shall fill him out, they shall tosse him, holde fast wag-tailes: so, come, in, take this bandy with the racket of patience, why when? dost stampe mad Tamberlaine, dost stampe? thou thinkst th’ast Morter under thy feete, dost? Ladies. Come, a bandy ho. Hor. O holde most sacred beauties.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 61

Sir Vau. Hold, silence, the puppet-teacher speakes. Hor. Sir Vaughan, noble Capten, Gentlemen, Crispinus, deare Demetrius Ô redeeme me, Out of this infamous—by God by Jesu— Cri. Nay, sweare not so good Horace: now these Ladies, Are made your executioners: prepare, To suffer like a gallant, not a coward; Ile trie t’unloose, their hands, impossible. Nay, womens vengeance are implacable. Hor. Why, would you make me thus the ball of scorne? Tuc. Ile tell thee why, because th’ast entred Actions of assault and battery, against a companie of honourable and worshipfull Fathers of the law: you wrangling rascal, law is one of the pillers ath land, and if thou beest bound too’t (as I hope thou shall bee) thou’t proove a skip-Jacke, thou’t be whipt. Ile tell thee why, because thy sputtering chappes yelpe, that Arrogance, and Impudence, and Ignoraunce, are the essentiall parts of a Courtier. Sir Vaugh. You remember Horace, they will puncke, and pincke, and pumpe you, and they catch you by the coxcombe: on I pray, one lash, a little more. Tuc. Ile tell thee why, because thou cryest ptrooh at worshipfull Cittizens, and cal’st them Flat-caps, Cuckolds, and banckrupts, and modest and vertuous wives punckes & cockatrices. Ile tell thee why, because th’ast arraigned two Poets against all lawe and conscience; and not content with that, hast turn’d them amongst a company of horrible blacke Fryers. Sir Vaugh. The same hand still, it is your owne another day, Master Horace, admonitions is good meate. Tuc. Thou art the true arraign’d Poet, and shouldst have been hang’d, but for one of these part-takers, these charitable Copper-lac’d Christians, that fetcht thee out of Purgatory, (Players I meane) Theaterians pouch-mouth Stage-walkers; for this Poet, for this, thou must lye with these foure wenches, in that blancket, for this— Hor. What could I doe, out of a just revenge, But bring them to the Stage? they envy me Because I holde more worthy company. Dem. Good Horace, no; my cheekes doe blush for thine, As often as thou speakst so, where one true And nobly-vertuous spirit, for thy best part Loves thee, I wish one ten, even from my heart. I make account I put up as deepe share In any good mans love, which thy worth earnes, As thou thy selfe; we envy not to see, Thy friends with Bayes to crown thy Poesie. No, heere the gall lyes, we that know what stuffe Thy verie heart is made of, know the stalke On which thy learning growes, and can give life To thy (once dying) basenes; yet must we Dance Antickes on your Paper. Hor. Fannius. Cris. This makes us angry, but not envious, No, were thy warpt soule, put in a new molde,

62 BEN JONSON

Ide weare thee as a Jewell set in golde. Sir Vau. And Jewels Master Horace, must be hang’d you know. Tuc. Good Pagans, well said, they have sowed up that broken seame-rent lye of thine, that Demetrius is out at Elbowes, and Crispinus is falne out with Sattin heere, they have; but bloate-herring dost heare? Hor. Yes honour’d Captaine, I have eares at will. Tuc. Ist not better be out at Elbowes, then to bee a bond-slave, and to goe all in Parchment as thou dost? Hor. Parchment Captaine? tis Perpetuana I assure you. Tuc. My Perpetuall pantaloone true, but tis waxt over; th’art made out of Wax; thou must answere for this one day; thy Muse is a hagler, and weares cloathes upon best-betrust; th’art great in some bodies books for this, thou knowst where; thou wouldst bee out at Elbowes, and out at heeles too, but that thou layest about thee with a Bill for this, a Bill— Hor. I confesse Capten,. I followed this suite hard. Tuc. I know thou didst, and therefore whilst we have Hiren heere, speake my little dishwashers, a verdit Pisse-kitchins. Omn. Blancket. Sir Vaugh. Holde I praye, holde, by Sesu I have put upon my heade, a fine device, to make you laugh, tis not your fooles Cap Master Horace, which you cover’d your Poetasters in, but a fine tricke, ha, ha, is jumbling in my braine. Tuc. Ile beate out thy braines, my whorson hansome dwarfe, but ile have it out of thee. Omnes. What is it good Sir Vaughan? Sir Vau. To conclude, tis after this manners, because Master Horace is ambition, and does conspire to bee more hye and tall, as God a mightie made him, wee’ll carry this terrible person to Court, and there before his Masestie Dub, or what do you call it, dip his Muse in some licour, and christen him, or dye him, into collours of a Poet. Omn. Excellent. Tuc. Super Super-excellent. Revelers goe, proceede you Masters of Arte in kissing these wenches, and in daunces, bring you the quivering Bride to Court, in a Maske, come Grumboll, thou shalt Mum with us; come dogge mee skneakes-bill. Hor. O thou my Muse! Sir Vaugh. Call upon God a mighty, and no Muses, your Muse I warrant is otherwise occupied, there is no dealing with your Muse now, therefore I pray marse, marse, oundes your Moose? Exeunt. (Sig. 13r–[14]v) (g) From Act V, Scene ii. [After Caelestine’s triumphant return from the dead, Horace is brought to judgement as an entertainment for the king (Crispinus has called him ‘selfe-creating Horace’, Sig. L2r).] Sir Vau. Horace and Bubo, pray send an answere into his Masesties eares, why you goe thus in Ovids Morter-Morphesis and strange fashions of apparrell. Tuc. Cur why? Asini. My Lords, I was drawne into this beastly suite by head and shoulders onely for love I bare to my Ningle.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 63

Tuc. Speake Ningle, thy mouth’s next, belch out, belch why— Hor. I did it to retyre me from the world; And turne my Muse into a Timonist, Loathing the general Leprozie of Sinne, Which like a plague runs through the soules of men: I did it but to— Tuc. But to bite every Motley-head vice by’th nost, you did it Ningle to play the Bugbeare Satyre, and make a Campe royall of fashion-mongers quake at your paper Bullets; you nastie Tortois, you and your Itchie Poetry breake out like Christmas, but once a yeare, and then you keepe a Revelling, and Araigning, and a Scratching of mens faces, as tho you were Tyber the long-tail’d Prince of Rattes, doe you? Cris. Horace. Sir Vaugh. Silence, pray let all urdes be strangled, or held fast betweene your teeth. Cris. Under controule of my dread Soveraigne, We are thy Judges; thou that didst Arraigne, Art now prepar’d for condemnation; Should I but bid thy Muse stand to the Barre, Thy selfe against her wouldst give evidence: For flat rebellion against the Sacred lawes, Of divine Poesie: heerein most she mist, Thy pride and scorn made her turne Saterist, And not her love to vertue (as thou Preachest) Or should we minister strong pilles to thee: What lumpes of hard and indigested stuffe, Of bitter Satirisme, of Arrogance, Of Selfe-love, of Detraction, of a blacke And stinking Insolence should we fetch up? But none of these, we give thee what’s more fit, With stinging nettles Crowne his stinging wit. Tuc. Wel said my Poeticall huckster, now he’s in thy handling rate him, doe, rate him well. Hor. O I beseech your Majesty, rather than thus to be netled, Ile ha my Satyres coate pull’d over mine eares, and bee turn’d out a the nine Muses Service. Asin. And I too, let mee be put to my shiftes with myne Ningle. Sir Vaugh. By Sesu so you shall Master Bubo; flea off this hairie skin Master Horace, so, so, so, untrusse, untrusse. Tuc. His Poeticall wreath my dapper puncke-fetcher. Hor. Ooh— Sir Vaugh. Nay your oohs, nor your Callin-oes cannot serve your turne, your tongue you know is full of blisters with rayling, your face full of pockey-holes and pimples, with your fierie inventions: and therefore to preserve your head from aking, this Biggin is yours, —nay by Sesu you shall bee a Poet, though not Lawrefyed, yet Nettlefyed, so: Tuc. Sirra stincker, thou’rt but untruss’d now, I owe thee a whipping still, and Ile pay it: I have layd roddes in Pisse and Vineger for thee: It shall not bee the Whipping a’th Satyre, nor the Whipping of the blinde-Beare, but of a counterfeit Jugler, that steales the name of Horace. King. How? counterfeit? does hee usurpe that name? Sir Vaugh. Yes indeede ant please your Grace, he does sup up that abhominable name.

64 BEN JONSON

Tuc. Hee does O King Cambises, he does: thou hast no part of Horace in thee but’s name, and his damnable vices: thou hast such a terrible mouth, that thy beard’s afraide to peepe out: but, looke heere you staring Leviathan, heere’s the sweet visage of Horace; looke perboylde-face, looke; Horace had a trim long-beard, and a reasonable good face for a Poet, (as faces goe now-a-dayes) Horace did not skrue and wriggle himselfe into great Mens famyliarity, (impudentlie) as thou doost: nor weare the Badge of Gentlemens company, as thou doost thy Taffetie sleeves tackt too onely with some pointes of profit: No, Horace had not his face puncht full of Oylet-holes, like the cover of a warming-pan: Horace lov’d Poets well, and gave Coxcombes to none other but fooles; but thou lov’st none, neither Wisemen nor fooles, but thy selfe: Horace was a goodly Corpulent Gentleman, and not so leane a hollow-cheekt Scrag as thou art: No, heere’s the Coppy of thy countenance, by this will I learne to make a number of villanous faces more, and to look scurvily upon the world, as thou dost. ⋆⋆⋆ [Asinius Bubo is made to forswear having Horace write his inscriptions and loveletters for him, carrying Latin poetry-books he doesn’t understand around with him, and calling Horace ‘his Ningle’.] Sir Vaugh. Now Master Horace, you must be a more horrible swearer, for your oath must be (like your wittes) of many collours; and like a Brokers booke of many parcels. Tuc. Read, read; th’inventory of his oath. Hor. Ile swear till my haire stands up an end, to bee rid of this sting, oh this sting. Sir Vaugh. Tis not your sting of conscience, is it? Tuc. Upon him: Inprimis. Sir Vaugh. Inprimis, you shall sweare by Phæbus and the halfe a score Muses lacking one: not to sweare to hang your selfe, if you thought any Man, Ooman or Silde, could write Playes and Rimes, as well-favour’d ones as your selfe. Tuc. Well sayd, hast brought him toth gallowes already? Sir Vaugh. You shall swear not to bumbast out a new Play, with the olde lynings of Jestes, stolne from the Temples Revels. Tuc. To him olde Tango. Sir Vaugh. Moreover, you shall not sit in a Gallery, when your Comedies and Enterludes have entred their Actions, and there make vile and bad faces at everie line, to make Sentlemen have an eye to you, and to make Players afraide to take your part. Tuc. Thou shalt be my Ningle for this. Sir Vaugh. Besides, you must forswear to venter on the stage, when your Play is ended, and to exchange curtezies, and complements with Gallants in the Lordes roomes, to make all the house rise up in Armes, and to cry that’s Horace, that’s he, that’s he, that’s he, that pennes and purges Humours and diseases. Tuc. There boy, agen. Sir Vaugh. Secondly, when you bid all your friends to the marriage of a poore couple, that is to say: your Wits and necessities, alias dictus, to the rifling of your Muse: alias, your Muses up-sitting: alias a Poets Whitson-Ale; you shall sweare that within three dayes after, you shall not abroad, in Booke-binders shops, brag that your Vize-royes or Tributorie-Kings, have done homage to you, or paide quarterage.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 65

Tuc. Ile busse thy head Holofernes. Sir Vaugh. Moreover and Inprimis, when a Knight or Sentlemen of urship, does give you his passe-port, to travaile in and out to his Company, and gives you money for Gods sake; I trust in Sesu, you will sweare (tooth and nayle) not to make scalde and wrymouth Jestes upon his Knight-hood, will you not? Hor. I never did it by Parnassus. Tuc. Wut sweare by Parnassus and lye too, Doctor Doddipol? Sir Vaugh. Thirdly, and last of all saving one, when your Playes are misse likt at Court, you shall not crye Mew like a Pusse-cat, and say you are glad you write out of the Courtiers Element. Tuc. Let the Element alone, tis out a thy reach. Sir Vaugh. In brieflynes, when you Sup in Tavernes, amongst your betters, you shall sweare not to dippe your Manners in too much sawce, nor a Table to fling Epigrams, Embleames, or Play-speeches about you (lyke Hayle-stones) to keepe you out of the terrible daunger of the Shot, upon payne to sit at the upper end of the Table, a’th left hand of Carlo Buffon: sweare all this, by Apollo and the eight or nine Muses. Hor. By Apollo, Helicon, the Muses (who march three and three in a rancke) and by all that belongs to Pernassus, I sweare all this. Tuc. Beare witnes. Cris. That fearefull wreath, this honour is your due, All Poets shall be Poet-Apes but you; Thanks (Learnings true Mecœnas, Poesies king) Thankes for that gracious eare, which you have lent, To this most tedious, most rude argument. King. Our spirits have well been feasted; he whose pen Drawes both corrupt, and cleare bloud from all men: (Careles what veine he prickes) let him not rave, When his owne sides are strucke, blowes, blowes doe crave. (Sig. L3r–M2r) [In the ‘Epilogus’ Tucca encourages the audience to applaud so ‘that Hereticall Libertine Horace’ ‘will write against it, and you may have more sport’. (Sig. M2v– [M3]r)] NOTES 1 ‘A monster awful, shapeless, huge, bereft of light’: Virgil, Aeneid, 3.658. 2 As Hieronimo in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, revived in 1597. 3 This part has not been identified.

66

8. Charles Fitzgeffrey on Jonson 1601

‘Ad Beniaminum Ionsonium’, Latin epigram addressed to Jonson in Affaniae: sive Epigrammatum Libri Tres (Oxford 1601), Book ii, pp. 60–1. The translation printed here is by the Revd Alexander B.Grosart, from his edition of The Poems of the Rev. Charles Fitzgeoffrey (Manchester 1881), pp. xxi–xxii. Fitzgeffrey (? 1575–1638) was educated at Oxford, published a poem on Drake in 1596 (Sir Francis Drake, his Honorable Lifes Commendation and his Tragicall Deathes Lamentation), went into orders and published a series of sermons from 1620. His epigram is printed here for its tribute to the laughter provoked by Jonson’s early comedies. There are a number of epigrams addressed to the poets in Book ii, including ones to Spenser, Campion, Drayton, and Marston. W.David Kay, ‘The Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Career: A Reexamination of Some Facts and Problems’, Modern Philology (1970), lxvii, 227, notes that the reference to Plautus here indicates that Fitzgeffrey is thinking of The Case is Altered which is based on the Roman playwright’s Captivi and Aulularia. Jonson, I call thee, come thou forth to justice, I’m here to drag thee to the bar of Phœbus, Guilty of stealing and of wicked thieving, All the nine Muses sitting by in circle. Know then that certain plays of wondrous beauty, Which in the shade of an Elysian rose-bed, Plautus most merry of the choir of poets Lately composed, and to the gods recited On starry seats, all sitting round to listen, Moving to peals of laughter the Eternals, And drawing smiles from Jupiter’s grim visage. Each pole of heaven thundering with applauses. These plays, I say then—plays so wondrous clever, Thou stolest basely while the gods were busy, And now proceedest as thine own to vend them: Jonson, to justice come thou forth—I call thee! Lo, to defend thee, King and father Phœbus Rises at once, O Jonson, and before all

68 BEN JONSON

Bears solemn witness that indeed thine own were These famous plays, and that thou didst compose them, Himself being privy to them and assisting. Whence then, I pray, did Plautus having got them, Read them aloud to Jove and the Eternals? Lo, Maia’s son and Atlas clever grandson, Wings on his swift feet, on his fingers birdlime, Mercury, sharp boy, and a very rascal, Aught to conceal with merry theft and laughter; As once before, when love of his own torches He deftly stripped, and robbed him of his quiver, So, lately (since he often is accustomed With thee to play, and clap his hands, and crack jokes), From thee he stole these scattered sheets of paper, And bade them mount up with him to the Heavenlies. Now, put to shame, I’m silent, thou dost conquer, O Jonson, Phœbus being thy judge and patron!

9. Cambridge views on the War of the Theatres 1601–2

From the anonymous The Returne from Pernassus: Or The Scourge of Simony (1606). This, the third of the Parnassus plays, was acted by the students at St John’s College, Cambridge, over 1601–2. It was the only one printed at the time. The likeliest candidate for the ‘purge’ mentioned in the second extract is Satiromastix. (a) From Act I, Scene ii. [Ingenioso, a scholar, and Judicio, a correcter of the press, are examining ‘Belvedere’, i.e. Bel-vedere, or The Garden of the Muses, 1600, which was edited by Anthony Munday, and probably planned by John Bodenham: see J.B.Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601) (1949) pp. 230–1n. They discuss the authors as they come up; Jonson has just been mentioned.] Jud. The wittiest fellow of a Bricklayer in England. Ing. A meere Empyrick, one that getts what he hath by observation, and makes onely nature privy to what he endites, so slow an Inventor, that he were better betake himselfe to his old trade of Bricklaying, a bould whorson, as confident now in making of a booke, as he was in times past in laying of a brick. [They go on to discuss ‘William Shatespeare’.] (Sig. B2v) (b) From Act IV, Scene iii. [The scholars Philomusus and Studioso are to be auditioned by Burbage and Kempe; Burbage hopes for ‘a good conceite in a part’ from the scholars, Kempe says they are proud, and speak only at the end of their walks across the stage.] Bur. A little teaching will mend these faults, and it may bee besides they will be able to pen a part. Kemp. Few of the university pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina & Juppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.

70 BEN JONSON

Bur. Its a shrewd fellow indeed: I wonder these schollers stay so long, they appointed to be here presently that we might try them…. (Sig. G3r)

10. Henry Chettle, Jonson’s steel pen 1603

From Englandes Mourning Garment (1603). This pastoral in prose and verse, lamenting the death of Elizabeth, contains a set of verses reproaching the poets of the day for their silence on the occasion, spoken by the shepherd Collin. The eleven poets are referred to by pseudonyms and periphrases, Chapman as Coryn, Jonson as Horace and Shakespeare as Melicert in the extract below. There is an ‘Antihorace’ in the list (Sig. D3r), perhaps Dekker, as Henry Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (1934), p. 52, suggests. Chettle (born about 1560–1, died before 1607) was a printer. He edited Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit in 1592 and became a prolific playwright. It is interesting to see Jonson at this early date pictured as the sharp drawer of character and true satirist, and placed next to Shakespeare of the honeyed Rape of Lucrece. Neither doth Coryn full of worth and wit, That finisht dead Musæus gracious song, With grace as great, and words, and verse as fit; Chide meager death for dooing vertue wrong: He doth not seeke with songs to deck her herse, Nor make her name live in his lively verse. Nor does our English Horace, whose steele pen Can drawe Characters which will never die, Tell her bright glories unto listning men, Of her he seemes to have no memorie. His Muse an other path desires to tread, True Satyres scourge the living leave the dead. Nor doth the silver tonged Melicert, Drop from his honied muse one sable teare To mourne her death that graced his desert, And to his laies opend her Royall eare. Shepheard remember our Elizabeth, And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death. (Sig. D2v–D3r)

72

11. Samuel Daniel attacks the learned masque 1604

From the dedication to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, of The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (performed and published in 1604). Jonson had not yet produced a masque for the court, but his approach to the entertainment for King James in the previous year (see No. 12, below) suggests that he was one of the chief of the party against which Daniel is directing his attack here, in defending his own understanding of the masque. For Jonson’s reply, see No. 18, below. And though these Images have oftentimes divers significations, yet it being not our purpose to represent them, with all those curious and superfluous observations, we tooke them only to serve as Hierogliphicqs for our present intention, according to some one property that fitted our occasion, without observing other their misticall interpretations, wherein the Authors themselves are so irrigular & confused, as the best Mytheologers, who will make somewhat to seem any thing, are so unfaithful to themselves, as they have left us no certain way at all, but a tract of confusion to take our course at adventure. And therefore owing no homage to their intricate observations, we were left at libertie to take no other knowledge of them, then fitted our present purpose, nor were tyed by any lawes of Heraldry to range them otherwise in their precedencies, then they fell out to stand with the nature of the matter in hand. (Sig. A4r) ⋆⋆⋆ And thus Madame, have I briefly delivered, both the reason and manner of this Maske; as well to satisfie the desire of those who could not well note the cariage of these passages, by reason (as I sayd) the present pompe and splendor entertain’d them otherwise (as that which is most regardfull in these Shewes) wherein (by the unpartiall opinion of all the beholders Strangers and others) it was not inferiour to the best that was ever presented in Christen-dome…. And for the captious Censurers, I regard not what they can say, who commonly can do little els but say; and if their deepe judgements ever serve them to produce any thing, they must stand on the same Stage of Censure with other men, and peradventure performe no such great wonders as they would make us believe: and I comfort my selfe in this, that in Court I know not any, (under him, who actes the greatest partes) that is not obnoxious to envie, & a sinister interpretation. And whosoever strives to shewe most wit about these Puntillos of Dreames and showes, are sure sicke of a disease they cannot hide, & would faine have the world to thinke them very deeply learned in all misteries whatsoever. And

74 BEN JONSON

peradventure they thinke themselves so, which if they doe, they are in a farre worse case then they imagine; Non potest non indoctus esse qui se doctum credit.1 And let us labour to shew never so much skill or Art, our weaknesses and ignorance will be seene, whatsoever covering wee cast over it. And yet in these matters of shewes (though they bee that which most entertaine the world) there needs no such exact sufficiency in this kind. For Ludit istis animus, non proficit.2 (Sig. [a4]v–Br) NOTES 1 ‘He cannot but be ignorant who believes himself to be learned.’ 2 ‘The mind plays with these things, does not profit from them.’

12. Thomas Dekker on Jonson’s pedantry 1604

From the account of ‘The Device’ in Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment: Given to king James…15th March, 1603. Dekker and Jonson collaborated on an entertainment for James on his entry into London on 15 March 1603. They published separate accounts of the devices and speeches presented on the occasion. In defending his creation of a female Genius of London to be the first to welcome the king, Dekker, in his published version, The Magnificent Entertainment, pours scorn on Jonson’s elaborate display of scholarship in his account, The King’s Entertainment (Jonson had a male ‘Genius Urbis’ in his part of the Entertainment). Dekker’s device had not in fact been performed. …the induction of such a Person, might (without a Warrant from the court of Critists) passe very currant. To make a false florish here with the borrowed weapons of all the old Maisters of the noble Science of Poesie, and to keepe a tyrannicall coyle, in Anatomizing Genius, from head to foote, (only to shewe how nimbly we can carve up the whole messe of the Poets) were to play the Executioner, and to lay our Cities houshold God on the rack, to make him confesse, how many paire of Latin sheets, we have shaken & cut into shreds to make him a garment. Such feates of Activitie are stale, and common among Schollers, (before whome it is protested we come not now (in a Pageant) to play a Maisters prize). For Nunc ego ventosæ Plebis suffiagia venor.1 The multitude is now to be our Audience, whose heads would miserably runne a woollgathering, if we doo but offer to breake them with hard words. (Sig. [A4]r-v) NOTE 1 ‘I am [not] one to hunt for the votes of a fickle public’: Horace, Epistles, 1.19.37.

76

13. John Marston, tribute to Jonson 1604

From the epilogue to The Malcontent (1604). The play is dedicated to Jonson, ‘POETÆ ELEGANTISSIMO GRAVISSIMO AMICO SUO CANDIDO ET CORDATO’ (‘To the most elegant and eminent poet, his candid and judicious friend’). Then till an others happier Muse appears, Till his Thalia feast your learned eares, To whose desertfull Lampes pleasd Fates impart, Art above Nature, Judgement above Art, Receive this peece which hope, nor feare yet daunteth, He that knows most, knows most how much he wanteth. (Sig. Iv)

78

14. Sir Edward Herbert on Jonson’s Horace 1604

‘Upon his Friend Mr. Ben: Jonson, and his Translation’. Printed in Q.Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry. Englished by Ben: Jonson (1640). Drummond in the Conversations mentions that Jonson told him there was an ‘Epigrame’ by Herbert prefixed to Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry (H & S, i, 134), and it must have survived with the manuscript of the translation from which John Benson printed it in 1640: the verses by Herbert appear there. The passage in the Conversations also seems to indicate that the translation was made in 1604. Herbert (1583–1648), philosopher, traveller, and soldier, was knighted by James soon after his succession and was created Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1629. Jonson has an epigram in praise of him (Epig. 106), and one of the books in his library is inscribed ‘Ex dono Ed. Herberti Equitis Amiciss. Doctiss.’ (‘Given by Edward Herbert, most friendly and most learned knight’: H & S, i, 270). Twas not enough, Ben: Jonson to be thought Of English Poets best, but to have brought In greater state, to their acquaintance, one Made equall to himselfe and thee; that none Might be thy second: while thy glory is To be the Horace of our times, and his. (Sig. A7r)

80

15. Jonson as laureate 1605

From the anonymous Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605). The author of this euphuistic pamphlet is describing the predicament of the Godunov family after the sudden death of the Tsar Boris Fedorovich Godunov in April 1605, which took place during Sir Thomas Smith’s visit to Russia as James’s special ambassador. Oh for some excellent pen-man to deplore their state: but he which would lively, naturally, or indeed poetically delyneate or enumerate these occurrents, shall either lead you thereunto by a poeticall spirit, as could well, if well he might the dead living, lifegiving Sydney Prince of Poesie; or deifie you with the Lord Salustius1 devinity, or in an Earth-deploring, Sententious, high rapt Tragedie with the noble Foulk-Grevill, not onely give you the Idea, but the soule of the acting Idea; as well could, if so we would, the elaborate English Horace that gives number, waight, and measure to every word, to teach the reader by his industries, even our Lawreat worthy Benjamen, whose Muze approves him with (our mother) the Ebrew signification to bee, The elder Sonne, and happely to have been the Childe of Sorrow: It were worthy so excellent rare Witt: for myselfe I am neither Apollo nor Appelles, no nor any heire to the Muses: yet happely a younger brother, though I have as little bequeathed me, as many elder Brothers, and right borne Heires gaine by them: but Hic labor, Hoc opus est.2 (Sig. Kv) NOTES 1 I.e. Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas (1544–90), Huguenot author of La Semaine (1578), on the seven days of creation. 2 ‘This is the toil, this the task’: Virgil, Aeneid, 6.129.

82

16. On Sejanus 1605

From the quarto of the play (1605): it had been performed in 1603. (a) Jonson, ‘To the Readers’. The following, and voluntary Labours of my Friends, prefixt to my Booke, have releived me in much, whereat (without them) I should necessarilie have touchd: Now, I will onely use three or foure short, and needfull Notes, and so rest. First, if it be objected, that what I publish is no true Poeme; in the strict Lawes of Time. I confesse it: as also in the want of a proper Chorus, whose Habite, and Moodes are such, and so difficult, as not any, whome I have scene since the Auntients, (no not they who have most presently affected Lawes) have yet come in the way off. Nor is it needful, or almost possible, in these our Times, and to such Auditors, as commonly Things are presented, to observe the ould state, and splendour of Drammattick Poemes, with preservation of any popular delight. But of this I shall take more seasonable cause to speake; in my Observations upon Horace his Art of Poetry, which (with the Text translated) I intend, shortly to publish. In the meane time, if in truth of Argument, dignity of Persons, gravity and height of Elocution, fulnesse and frequencie of Sentence, I have discharg’d the other offices of a Tragicke writer, let not the absence of these Formes be imputed to me, wherein I shall give you occasion hereafter (and without my boast) to thinke I could better prescribe, then omit the due use, for want of a convenient knowledge. The next is least in some nice nostrill, the Quotations might savour affected, I doe let you know, that I abhor nothing more; and have onely done it to shew my integrity in the Story, and save myselfe in those common Torturers, that bring all wit to the Rack: whose Noses are ever like Swine spoyling, and rooting up the Muses Gardens, and their whole bodies, like Moles, as blindly working under earth to cast any, the least, hilles upon Vertue. Whereas, they are in Latine and the worke in English, it was presupposd, none but the Learned would take the paynes to conferre them, the Authors themselves being all in the learned Tongues…. Lastly I would informe you, that this Booke, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the publike Stage, wherein a second Pen had good share: in place of which I have rather chosen, to put weaker (and no doubt lesse pleasing) of mine own, then to defraud so happy a Genius of his right, by my lothed usurpation. Fare you well. And if you read farder of me, and like, I shall not be afraid of it though you praise me out.

84 BEN JONSON

Neque enim mihi cornea fibra est.1 But that I should plant my felicity, in your generall saying Good, or Well, &c. were a weaknesse which the better sort of you might worthily contemne, if not absolutely hate me for. BEN. JONSON. and no such. Quem Palma negata macrum, donata reducit opimum.2 (Sig. ¶ 2r-v) (b) George Chapman, ‘IN SEIANUM BEN. IONSONI Et Musis, et sibi in deliciis’ (‘To the Sejanus of Ben Jonson, favourite both of the Muses and of himself’).

[Chapman also wrote a commendatory poem for the 1607 Quarto of Volpone. Included here for the sake of the extended metaphors for Jonson’s borrowings and for his writing for the public theatre. Chapman also suggests that Sejanus is vividly instructive. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson: Dramatist (Cambridge 1984), p. 93, suggests that Chapman is referring to unpublished early tragedies by Jonson when he says below that Jonson’s muse had previously ‘shut her soft wings, and durst not shew her spirit’.] So brings the wealth-contracting Jeweller Pearles and deare Stones, front richest shores & streames, As thy accomplish Travaile doth confer From skill-inriched soules, their wealthier Gems; So doth his hand enchase in ammeld Gould, Cut, and adornd beyond their Native Merits, His solid Flames, as thine hath here inrould In more then Goulden Verse, those betterd spirits; So he entreasures Princes Cabinets, As thy Wealth will their wished Libraries; So, on the throate of the rude Sea, he sets His ventrous foote, for his illustrous Prise; And through wilde Desarts, armd with wilder Beasts, As thou adventurst on the Multitude, Upon the boggy, and engulfed brests Of Hyrelings, sworne to finde most Right, most rude: And he, in stormes at Sea doth not endure, Nor in vast Desarts, amongst Woolves, more danger; Then we, that would with Vertue live secure, Sustaine for her in every Vices anger. Nor is this Allegoric unjustly rackt, To this strange length; Onely that Jewels are, In estimation meerely, so exact: And thy worke, in it selfe, is deare and Rare. Wherein Minerva had beene vanquished, Had she, by it, her sacred Loomes advanc’t, And through thy subject woven her graphicke Thread,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 85

Contending therein, to be more entranc’t; For, though thy hand was scarce addrest to drawe The Semi-circle of Sejanus life, Thy Muse yet makes it the whole Sphære, and Lawe To all State Lives: and bounds Ambitions strife. And as a little Brooke creepes from his Spring, With shallow tremblings, through the lowest Vales, As if he feard his streame abroad to bring, Least prophane Feete should wrong it, and rude Gales; But finding happy Channels, and supplies Of other Fordes mixe with his modest course, He growes a goodly River, and descries The strength, that mannd him, since he left his Source; Then takes he in delightsome Meades, and Groves, And, with his two-edg’d waters, flourishes Before great Palaces, and all Mens Loves Build by his shores, to greets his Passages: So thy chaste Muse, by vertuous selfe-mistrust, Which is a true Marke of the truest Merit, In Virgin feare of Mens illiterate Lust, Shut her soft wings, and durst not showe her spirit; Till, nobly cherisht, now thou lett’st her flie, Singing the sable Orgies of the Muses, And in the highest Pitche of Tragedie, Mak’st her command, al things thy Ground produces. But, as it is a signe of Loves first firing, Not Pleasure by a lovely Presence taken, And Bouldnesse to attempt; but close Retiring, To places desolate, and Fever-shaken; So, when the love of Knowledge first affects us, Our Tongues doe falter, and the Flame doth rove Through our thinne spirits, and of feare detects us T’attaine her Truth, whom we so truely love. ⋆⋆⋆ Though Others qualified, then, with Naturall skill, (More sweete mouthd, and affecting shrewder wits) Blanche Coles, call Illnesse, good, and Goodnesse ill, Breath thou the fire, that true-spoke Knowledge fits. Thou canst not then be Great? yes. Who is he, (Said the good Spartane King) greater then I, That is not likewise juster? No degree Can boast of emminence, or Emperie, (As the great Stagerite held) in any One

86 BEN JONSON

Beyond Another, whose Soule farther sees, And in whose Life the Gods are better knowne: Degrees of Knowledge difference all Degrees. Thy Poeme, therefore, hath this due respect, That it lets passe nothing, without observing, Worthy Instruction; or that might correct Rude manners, and renowme the well deserving: Performing such a lively Evidence In thy Narrations, that thy Hearers still Thou turnst to thy Spectators; and the sense That thy Spectators have of good or ill, Thou inject’st joyntly to the Readers soules. So deare is held, so deckt thy numerous Taske, As thou putt’st handles to the Thespian Boules, Or stuckst rich Plumes in the Palladian Caske. All thy worth, yet, thyselfe must Patronise, By quaffing more of the Castalian Head; In expiscation of whose Mysteries, Our Netts must still be clogd, with heavy Lead, To make them sincke, and catche: For cheerefull Gould, Was never found in the Pierian Streames, But Wants, and Scornes, and Shame for silver sould. ⋆⋆⋆ And so good Friend, safe passage to thy Freight To thee a long Peace, through a vertuous strife, In which, lets both contend to Vertues height, Not making Fame our Object, but good life. Come forth SEJANUS, fall before this Booke, And of thy Falles Reviver, aske forgivenesse, That thy lowe Birth and Merits, durst to looke A Fortune in the face, of such unevennesse; For so his fervent love to Vertue, hates, That her pluckt plumes should wing Vice to such calling, That he presents thee to all marking States, As if thou hadst beene all this while in falling. His strong Arme plucking, from the Midle-world, Fames Brazen House, and layes her Towre as lowe, As HOMERS Barathrum; that, from Heaven hurld, Thou might’st fall on it; and thy Ruines growe To all Posterities, from his worke, the Ground, And under Heav’n, nought but his Song might sound. (Sig. [¶]3r- Av)

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 87

(c) ‘CYGNUS’, ‘To the deserving Author’.

When I respect thy argument, I see An Image of those Times: but when I view The wit, the workemanship, so rich, so true, The Times themselves do seeme retriv’d to me. And as Sejanus, in thy Tragedie, Falleth from Cæsars grace; even so the Crew Of common Play-wrights, whom Opinion blew Big with false greatnesse, are disgrac’d by thee. Thus, in one Tragedie, thou makest twaine: And, since faire workes of Justice fit the part Of Tragic writers, Muses doe ordaine That all Tragedians, Maisters of their Arte, Who shall hereafter follow on this tract, In writing well, thy Tragedie shall acte. (Sig. A2r) (d) John Marston, ‘Amicis, amici nostri dignissimi, dignissimis, Epigramma’ (‘To the most worthy friends, of our most worthy friend, an epigram’).

Yee ready Friendes, spare your unneedful Bayes, This worke dispairefull Envie must even praise: Phœbus hath voic’d it, loud, through ecchoing skies, SEJANUS FALL shall force thy Merit rise. For never English shall, or hath before Spoake fuller grac’d. He could say much, not more. (Sig. A3r) (e) ‘

’ ‘To him that hath so excell’d on this excellent subject’.

Thy Poeme (pardon me) is meere deceat. Yet such deceate, as thou that dost beguile, Are juster farre then they who use no wile: And they who are deceaved by this feat, More wise, then such who can eschewe thy cheat. For thou hast given each parte so just a stile, That Men suppose the Action now on file; (And Men suppose, who are of best conceat.) Yet some there be, that are not moov’d hereby, And others are so quick, that they will spy Where later Times are in some speech enweav’d; Those wary Simples, and these simple Elfes: They are so dull, they cannot be deceav’d, These so unjust, they will deceave themselves. (Sig. A3v) (f) ‘Ev. B’, ‘To the most understanding Poet’.

This may well be by Edmund Bolton; ‘Ev.’ would then be a misprint for ‘Ed.’. Bolton (? 1575—after 1634), a Roman Catholic, published numerous historical, antiquarian, and poetical works, beginning with a poem in England’s Helicon (1600). In 1617 he proposed

88 BEN JONSON

to King James a royal academy or college; Jonson’s name is included in a list of the eightyfour members Bolton proposed for it (H & S, i, 86), and Jonson is praised in Bolton’s Hypercritica of about 1621 (see No. 32, below). When in the GLOBES fair Ring, our Worlds best Stage, I saw Sejanus, set with that rich foyle, I look’t the Author should have borne the spoile Of conquest, from the Writers of the Age. But when I veiw’d the Peoples beastly rage, Bent to confound thy grave, and learned toile, That cost thee so much sweat, and so much oyle, My indignation I could hardly’ asswage. And many there (in passion) scarce could tell Whether thy fault, or theirs deserv’d most blame; Thine, for so shewing, theirs, to wrong the same: But both they left within that doubtfull Hell. From whence, this Publication setts thee free: They, for their Ignorance, still damned bee. (Sig. A3v) NOTES 1 ‘My heart is not made of horn’: Persius, Satires, 1.47. 2 ‘Whom denial of the palm sends home lean, its bestowal plump’: adapted from Horace, Epistles, 2.1.181.

17. John Marston glances at Sejanus 1606

The preface, ‘To the generall Reader’, to the Roman tragedy The Wonder of Women Or The Tragedie of Sophonisba (1606). Sophonisba was Marston’s last completed play. Know, that I have not labored in this poeme, to tie my selfe to relate any thing as an historian but to enlarge every thing as a Poet, To transcribe Authors, quote authorities, & translate Latin prose orations into English blank-verse, hath in this subject beene the least aime of my studies. Then (equall Reader) peruse me with no prepared dislike, and if ought shall displease thee thank thy selfe, if ought shall please thee thank not mee, for I confesse in this it was not my onely end. (Sig. A2r)

90

18. Ben Jonson on his masques 1606

From Hymenaei: Or The Solemnities of Masque, and Barriers, Magnificently performed on the eleventh, and twelfth Nights, from Christmas; At Court… (1606). (a) From the preface. [Included here for the sake of the indications it gives of a controversy about Jonson’s scholarly approach to the masque. Jonson, who had replaced Daniel as masque-maker for the Christmas season at court with the series of masques beginning with The Masque of Blackness, performed in the 1604–5 season, is apparently replying here to Daniel’s attack on the learned masque (No. 11, above).] It is a noble and just advantage, that the things subjected to Understanding have of those which are objected to Sense, that the one sorte are but momentarie, and meerely taking; the other impressing, and lasting: Else the Glory of all these Solemnities had perish’d like a Blaze, and gone out, in the Beholders eyes. So short-liv’d are the Bodies of all Thinges, in comparison of their Soules. And, though Bodies oft-times have the ill lucke to be sensually preferr’d, they find afterwards, the good fortune (when Soules live) to be utterly forgotten. This it is hath made the most royall Princes, and greatest Persons, (who are commonly the Personaters of these Actions) not onely studious of Riches, and Magnificence in the outward Celebration, or Shew; (which rightly becomes them) but curious after the most high, and hearty Inventions, to furnish the inward parts: (and those grounded upon Antiquitie, and solide Learnings) which, though their Voyce be taught to sound to present Occasions, their Sense, or dooth, or should alwayes lay hold on more remov’d Mysteries. And, howsoever some may squeamishly cry out, that all Endevor of Learning, and Sharpnesse in these transitory Devises especially, where it steppes beyond their little, or (let me not wrong ’hem) no Braine at all is superfluous; I am contented, these fastidious Stomachs should leave my full Tables, and enjoy at home, their cleane empty Trenchers, fittest for such airy Tasts: where perhaps a few Italian Herbs, pick’d up, & made into a Sallade, may find sweeter acceptance, than al, the most norishing, and sound Meates of the world. For these Mens palates, let not mee answere, O Muses. It is not my fault, if I fill them out Nectar, and they run to Metheglin.1 Vaticana bibant, si delectentur. All the curtesie I can doe them, is to cry, againe; Prætereant, si quid non facit ad stomachum.2

92 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

As I wil, from the thought of them to my better Subject. (b) From a marginal note on the allegory of the four Humours and the four Affections.

…And, for the Allegory, though here it be very cleare, and such as might well escape a Candle, yet because there are some, must complain of Darknes, that have but thick Eies, I am contented to hold them this Light. First, as in Naturall Bodies, so likewise in Mindes, there is no disease, or distemperature, but is caused either by som abounding Humor, or perverse Affection; After the same maner, in Politike Bodies (where Order, Ceremony, State, Reverence, Devotion are Parts of the Mind) by the difference, or predominant Wil of what we (Metaphorically) call Humors, and Affections, all things are troubled and confusd. These therefore, were Tropically brought in, before Marriage, as disturbers of that Mysticall Body, and the Rites, which were Soule unto it; that afterwards, in Marriage, being dutifully tempted by hir Power, they might more fully celebrate the happines of such as live in that sweet Union, to the harmonious Laws of Nature, and Reason. (Sig. Bv) (c) Note on the verse of the ‘Epithalamion’.

This Poeme had for the most part Versum intercalarem or Carmen Amœbæum;3 yet that not alwaies one, but oftentimes varied, and sometimes neglected in the same Song, as in ours you shall find observed. (Sig. Dr) NOTES 1 Metheglin is a Welsh mead made with herbs. 2 ‘They may drink Vatican [an inferior wine], if they prefer…They may pass by, if that does not suit their stomach’: adapted from Martial, 10.45.5–6. 3 ‘Intercalary lines [i.e. hypermetric lines inserted at intervals] …alternating verses’.

19. On Volpone 1605–7

From the prefatory material to the 1607 quarto. The play was performed in 1605. (a) Jonson, ‘The Prologue’. Now, luck God send us, and a little wit Will serve, to make our PLAY hit; (According to the palates of the season) Here is ri’me, not emptie of reason: This we were bid to credit, from our Poet, Whose true scope, if you would knowe it, In all his Poemes, still, hath beene this measure, To mixe profit, with your pleasure; And not as some (whose throates their envie fayling) Crie hoarsely, All he writes, is rayling: And, when his PLAYES come forth, thinke they can flout them, With saying, He was a yeare about them. To these there needes no Lye, but this his creature, Which was, two monthes since, no feature; And, though he dares give them five lives to mend it, ’Tis knowne, five weekes fully pen’d it: From his owne hand, without a Co-adjutor, Novice, Jorney-man, or Tutor. Yet, thus much I can give you, as a token Of his PLAYES worth, No egges are broken; Nor quaking Custards with feirce teeth affrighted, Wherewith your route are so delighted; Nor hales hee in a Gull, old ends reciting, To stop gappes in his loose writing; With such a deale of monstrous, and forc’d action: As might make Bethlem a faction: Nor made he’ his PLAY, for jests, stolne from each Table, But makes jests, to fit his Fable. And, so presents quick Comœdy, refined, As best Criticks have designed,

94 BEN JONSON

The Lawes of Time, Place, Persons, he observeth, From no needefull Rule he swerveth. All gall, and coppresse, from his inke, he drayneth, Onelie, a little salt remaineth; Wherewith, hee’ll rub your cheekes, till (red with laughter) They shall looke fresh, a weeke after. (Sig. [A4]v) (b) From ‘The Epistle’, addressed to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and dated 11 February 1607. H & S, i, 195, point out that Jonson used one of the arguments of this ‘Epistle’ in a 1605 letter to Cecil, written at the time of his imprisonment with Chapman for the unauthorized publication of Eastward Ho. For my particular, I can (and from a most cleare conscience) affirme that I have ever trembled to thinke toward the least Prophanenesse; have loathed the use of such foule, and un-wash’d Baudr’y, as is now made the foode of the Scene: And, howsoever I cannot escape, from some, the imputation of sharpnesse, but that they will say, I have taken a pride, or lust to be bitter, and not my youngest Infant but hath come into the world with all his teeth; I would aske of these supercilious Politiques, what Nation, Society, or generall Order, or State I have provoked? what publique Person? whether I have not (in all these) preserv’d their dignity, as mine owne person, safe? My WORKES are read, allow’d, (I speake of those that are intirely mine) looke into them, what broad reproofes I have usd: Where have I bin particular? Where personall, except to a Mimick, Cheater, Baud, or Buffon, creatures (for their insolencies) worthy to be tax’d? or to which of these so pointingly, as he might not, either ingeniously have confest, or wisely dissembled his disease? But it is not Rumour can make men guilty, much lesse entitle me, to other mens crimes. I know, that nothing can be so innocently writ, or carried, but may be made obnoxious to construction; mary, whilst I beare mine innocence about me, I feare it not. Application, is now, growne a Trade with many; and there are, that professe to have a Key for the deciphering of every thing, but let wise and noble Persons take heed how they bee too credulous, or give leave to these invading Interpreters to be over-familiar with their fames, who cunningly, & often, utter their owne virulent malice, under other mens simplest meanings. As for those, that wil (by faults which charity hath rak’d up, or common honesty conceald) make themselves a name with the Multitude, or (to drawe their rude, and beastly clappes) care not whose living faces they intrench with their petulant stiles; may they doe it, without a rivall, for mee: I chuse rather to live grav’d in obscuritie, then share with them, in so preposterous a fame. Nor can I blame the wishes of those grave, and wiser Patriotes, who providing the hurts these licentious spirits may doe in a State, devise rather to see Fooles, and Divells, and those antique reliques to Barbarisme retriv’d, with all other ridiculous, and exploded follies: then behold the wounds of Private men, of Princes, and Nations. For as HORACE, makes Trebatius speake, in these —Sibi quisque timet, quanquam est intactus, & odit.1

And men may justly impute such rages, if continu’d, to the Writer, as his sports. The encrease of which lust in liberty, together with the present trade of the Stage, in all their misc’line Enterludes, what learned or liberall soule doth not already abhor? where nothing but the garbage of the time is utter’d, & that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 95

of solœcismes, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepse’s, so rackt metaphor’s, with brothelry able to violate the eare of a Pagan, and blasphemy, to turne the bloud of a Christian to water. I cannot but be serious in a cause of this nature, wherein my fame, & the reputations of diverse honest, & learned are the question; when a NAME, so full of authority, antiquity, and all great marke, is (through their insolence) become the lowest scorne of the Age: and those MEN subject to the petulancie of every vernaculous Orator, that were wont to be the care of Kings, and happiest Monarchs. This it is that hath not onely rap’t mee to present indignation, but made mee studious, heretofore, and, by all my actions, to stand of, from them; which may most appeare in this my latest WORKE: (which you, most learned ARBITRESSES, have scene, judg’d, & to my crowne, approv’d) wherein I have labourd, for their instruction, and amendment, to reduce, not onely the ancient formes, but manners of the Scene, the easinesse, the propriety, the innocence, and last the doctrine, which is the principall end of POESY to informe men, in the best reason of living. And though my Catastrophe may, in the strict rigour of Comick Law, meete with censure, as turning back to my promise; I desire the learned, and charitable Critick to have so much faith in me, to thinke it was done off industrye: For with what ease I could have varied it, nearer his scale (but that I feare to boast my owne faculty) I could here insert. But my special aime being to put the snafle in their mouths, that crie out, we never punish vice in our Enterludes &c. I tooke the more liberty; though not without some lines of example drawne even in the Antients themselves, the goings out of whose Comœdies are not alwayes joyfull, but oftimes, the Baudes, the Servants, the Rivalls, yea and the maisters are mulcted: and fitly, it beeing the office of a Comick-POET to imitate justice, and instruct to life, or stirre up gentle affections. To which, upon my next opportunity toward the examining & digesting of my notes, I shall speake more wealthily, and pay the World a debt. In the meane time (most reverenced SISTERS) as I have car’d to be thankefull for your affections past, and here made the understanding acquainted with some ground of your favors; let me not dispayre their continuance, to the maturing of some worthier fruits: wherein, if my MUSES bee true to me, I shall raise the dispis’d head of POETRY againe, & stripping her out of those rotten and base ragges, wherewith the Times have adulterated her forme, restore her to her primitive habite, feature, and majesty, and render her worthy to be imbraced, and kist, of all the great and Maister Spirits of our World. As for the vile, and slothfull, who never affected an act, worthy of celebration, or are so inward with their owne vicious natures, as they worthely feare her; and thinke it a high point of policie, to keepe her in contempt with their declamatory, and windy invectives: shee shall out of just rage incite her Servants (who are Genus iritabile)2 to spout inke in their faces, that shall eate, farder then their marrow, into their fames; and not CINNAMUS the Barber, with his art, shall be able to take out the brands, but they shall live, and be read, till the Wretches die, as Things worst deserving of themselves in chiefe, and then of all mankind. (Sig. [¶]2r–[¶]4r) (c) E[dmund] B[olton], ‘Ad Utramque Academiam, De Be-niamin Ionsonio’ (‘To both Universities, in praise of Benjamin Jonson’). Translated. This is that man who first with fortunate endeavour will give learned plays to the Britons, like an explorer translating the ancient literary monuments of the Greeks and of the Roman theatre. Twin stars, favour his bold attempts. The ancient dramatists were content to win glory either in tragedy or in comedy. This man, the sun of the stage, handles

96 BEN JONSON

tragedy and comedy with equal skill. Volpone, you give jokes; Sejanus, you gave tears. But if some people complain that Jonson’s poetry is confined to narrow limits: then say in reply ‘Too unhappy are those Englishmen to whom the English language is not sufficiently known; or to whom (because they were born overseas) is not known at all. When in time the poet flourishes, he will change his native land, and he will himself become the English Apollo.’ (Sig. ¶ 4v) (d) John Donne, ‘Amicissimo, & meritissimo BEN: IONSON’ (‘To the most friendly and deserving Ben Jonson’). Translation from John T.Shawcross (ed.), The Poetry of John Donne (Garden City, NY 1967), p. 218. If, what here you have dared with your skill, O Poet, the deliberators of the law of men and God had dared to follow and to emulate the ancients, O might we all taste of salvation. But to these men the ancients are full of cobwebs; no one is such a follower of the ancients as you because you, restorer of the old, follow those you approve. Follow still what you pursue; and may your books be adorned with old age from their first hour: for assuredly youth is to be denied to literary works, and it is necessary that these books are born aged things, by which let your power be given immortality. Genius and toil render you equal to the ancients; outlive them so that you may ransom future men from our corruption, in which we surpass the past and future ages. (e) Francis Beaumont, ‘To my deare friend, Mr. Benjamin Jonson, upon his FOXE’. If it might stand with Justice, to allow The swift conversion of all follies; now, Such is my Mercy, that I could admit All sorts should equally approve the wit, Of this thy even worke: whose growing fame Shall raise thee high, and than it, with thy Name. And did not Manners, and my love command Mee to forbeare to make those understand, Whom thou, perhaps, hast in thy wiser doome Long since, firmely resolv’d, shall never come To know more then they do; I would have showne To all the world, the Art, which thou alone Hast taught our tongue, the rules of Time, of Place, And other Rites, deliver’d, with the grace Of Comick stile, which onely, is farre more, Then any English Stage hath knowne before.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 97

But since our subtle Gallants thinke it good To like of nought, that may be understood, Least they should be disprov’d; or have, at best, Stomacks so raw, that nothing can digest But what’s obscene, or barkes: Let us desire They may continue, simplie, to admire Fine clothes, and strange words; and may live, in age, To see themselves ill-brought upon the Stage, And like it. Whilst thy bold, and knowing Muse Contemnes all praise, but such as thou wouldst chuse. (Sig. A2r) (f) ‘D. D.’, ‘To my good friend. Mr Jonson’. Perhaps by Dudley Digges, for whom see No. 49(e), below. Suggests that while Jonson’s humour plays displaced the comic style of the ancients from the English stage, Volpone triumphantly revives that style. The strange new follies of this idle age, In strange new formes, presented on the Stage By thy quick Muse, so pleas’d judicious eyes; That the’once-admired antient Comœdies Fashions, like clothes growne out of fashion, lay Lock’d up from use: untill thy FOXE birth-day In an old garbe, shew’d so much art, and wit, As they the Laurell gave to thee, and it. (Sig. A2v) (g) ‘E.S.’, ‘To my worthily-esteemed Mr Ben: Jonson’. Perhaps by Edmund Scory, as suggested by H & S, xi, 322. Emphasizes the performances of the play in Oxford and Cambridge, and suggests that however fine the play may appear in printed form, it must have been finer yet in performance. VOLPONE now is dead indeed, and lies Exposed to the censure of all eies, And mouth’s; Now he hath run his traine, and show’n His subtill body, where he best was knowne; In both Minerva’s Cittyes: he doth yeeld, His well-form’d-limbes upon this open field. Who, if they now appeare so faire in sight, How did they, when they were endew’d with spright Of Action? Yet in thy praise let this be read, The FOXE will live, when all his hounds be dead. (Sig. [A3]v) NOTES 1 ‘Everybody is afraid for himself, though untouched, and hates you’: Satires, 2.1.23. 2 ‘The fretful tribe’: Horace, Epistles, 2.2.102.

98

20. Ben Jonson, more principles for the masque 1609

From The Masque of Queenes, performed and published in 1609. (a) Jonson offers decorum, variety, and unity as principles for the construction (and thus for the critical judgement) of this masque. It increasing, now, to the third time of my being us’d in these services to her Majesties personall presentations, with the Ladyes whom she pleaseth to honor; it was my first & speciall regard, to see that the Nobility of the invention should bee answerable to the dignity of their persons. For which reason I chose the argument, to be, A celebration of honorable, and true Fame, bred out of Vertue: observing that rule of the⋆ best Artist, to suffer no object of delight to passe without his mixture of profit & example. And because her Majestie (best knowing, that a principall part of life, in these Spectacles, lay in their variety) had commanded me to think on some Dance or shew, that might præcede hers, & have the place of a foile or false Masque; I was carefull to decline, not only from others, but mine owne steps in that kind, since the† last yeare, I had an Anti-masque of Boyes: and therfore now, devis’d, that twelve Women, in the habit of Hags, or Witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspition, Credulity. &c. the opposits to good Fame, should fill that part; not as a Masque, but a Spectacle of strangenes, producing multiplicitie of gesture, and not unaptly sorting with the current, and whole fall of the devise. (Sig. [A4]r) (b) Answering an objection to the mixture of persons in the masque.

But, here, I discerne a possible objection, arising against me; to which I must turne: As, How can I bring Persons of so different Ages, to appeare properly together? or, why (which is more unnaturall) with Virgil’s Mezentius,1 I joyne the living with the dead? I answer to both these, at once. Nothing is more proper; Nothing more naturall. For these all live, and together, in their Fame: & so I present them. Besides, if I would fly to the all-daring power of Poetry, where could I not take Sanctuary? or in whose Poeme? For other objections, let the lookes and noses of Judges hover thick; so they bring the braines: or if they do not, I care not. When I suffer’d it to go abroad, I departed with my right: And now, so secure an Interpreter I am of my chance, that neither praise, nor dispraise shal affect me. (Sig. E3v) NOTES • Hor in Art. Poetic.

100 BEN JONSON

† In the Masque at my L.Hadding. wedding. 1 Mezentius used to make his living victims embrace corpses, so bringing on a lingering death (Aeneid, 8.485–8).

21. Jonson’s comedy malicious and factious 1610

From the anonymous comedy Mucedorus (1610). There were earlier editions in 1598 and 1606; in 1610 new material was added to the dialogue between ‘Comedie’ and ‘Envie’ at the end of the play, including the passage below. The writer must be referring to Jonson, who was well known for his ‘needie Beard’, and to Jonson’s early satirical plays. Env. …From my foule Studie will I hoyst a Wretch, A leane and hungry Neager Canniball: Whose jawes swell to his eyes, with chawing Malice: And him Ile make a Poet. Com. What’s that to’th purpose? Env. This scrambling Raven, with his needie Beard, Will I whet on to write a Comedie, Wherein shall be compos’d darke sentences, Pleasing to factious braines. And every other where, place me a Jest, Whose high abuse, shall more torment then blowes: Then I my selfe (quicker then Lightning) Will flie me to a puisant Magistrate, And waighting with a Trencher, at his backe, In midst of jollitie, rehearse those gaules, (With some additions) so lately vented in your Theater: He upon this, cannot but make complaint, To your great danger, or at least restraint. Com. Ha, ha, ha, I laugh to heare thy folly; This is a trap for Boyes, not Men, nor such, Especially desertfull in their doinges, Whose stay’d discretion, rules their purposes. I and my faction, doe eschew those vices…. (Sig. F3r-v)

102

22. Ben Jonson, prologue to The Alchemist 1610

Text from the 1612 quarto of the play, which was first performed in 1610. Fortune, that favours Fooles, these two short howers We wish away; both for your sakes, and ours, Judging Spectators: and desire in place, To th’ Author justice, to our selves but grace. Our Scene is LONDON, ’cause we would make knowne. No Countries mirth is better then our owne. No Clime breedes better matter, for your Whore, Baud, Squire, Impostor, many Persons more, Whose manners, now call’d Humors, feede the Stage: And which have still beene Subject, to the rage Or spleene of Comick writers. Though this Pen Did never ayme to grieve, but better Men; How e’er the Age, he lives in, doth endure The vices that she breedes, above their cure. But, when the wholsome remedies are sweet, And, in their working, Gaine, and Profit meete, He hopes to finde no spirit so much diseas’d, But will, with such fayre Correctives, be pleas’d. For here, he doth not feare, who can apply. If there be any, that will sit so nigh Unto the streame, to looke what it doth runne, They shall finde things, they’ld thinke, or wish, were done; They are so naturall follies: But so showne, As even the Doers may see, and yet not owne. (Sig. [A4]v)

104

23. On Catiline 1611

From the prefatory material to the 1611 quarto of the play. It had been performed earlier in the same year. (a) Jonson’s dedication to William, Earl of Pembroke. MY LORD, In so thicke, and darke an ignorance, as now almost covers the Age, I crave leave to stand neare your light: and, by that, to be read. Posterity may pay your benefit the honor, and thanks; when it shall know, that you dare, in these Jig-given times, to countenance a legitimate Poeme. I must call it so, against all noise of opinion: from whose crude, and ayry reports, I appeale, to that great and singular faculty of Judgment in your Lordship, able to vindicate truth from error: It is the first (of this race) that ever I dedicated to any Person, and had I not thought it the best, it should have been taught a lesse ambition. Now, it approcheth your censure chearfully, and with the same assurance, that Innocency would appeare before a Magistrate. Your. Lo. most faithfull Honorer. Ben. Jonson. (Sig. A2r-v) (b) Jonson’s prefaces. TO THE READER IN ORDINARIE

The muses forbid, that I should restrayne your medling, whom I see already busie with the Title, and tricking over the leaves: It is your owne. I departed with my right, when I let it first abroad. And, now, so secure an Interpreter I am of my chance, that neither praise, nor dispraise from you can affect mee. Though you commend the first two Actes, with the people, because they are the worst; and dislike the Oration of Cicero, in regard you read some pieces of it, at Schoole, and understand them not yet; I shall finde the way to forgive you. Be anything you will be, at your owne charge. Would I had deserv’d but halfe so well of it in translation, as that ought to deserve of you in judgment, if you have any. I know you will pretend (whosoever you are) to have that, and more. But all pretences are not just claymes. The commendation of good things may fall within a many, their approbation but in a few: for the most commend out of affection, selfe tickling, an easinesse, or imitation: but men judge only out of knowledge. That is the trying faculty. And, to those workes that will beare a Judge, nothing is more dangerous then a foolish prayse. You will say I shall not have yours, therfore; but

106 BEN JONSON

rather the contrary, all vexation of Censure. If I were not above such molestations now, I had great cause to thinke unworthily of my studies, or they had so of mee. But I leave you to your exercise. Beginne. To the Reader extraordinary You I would understand to be the better Man, though Places in Court go otherwise: to you I submit my selfe, and worke. Farewell. BEN: JONSON. (Sig. [A3]r) (c) Francis Beaumont, ‘To my friend Mr. Ben: Jonson, upon his Catiline’.

If thou had’st itch’d after the wild applause Of common people, and had’st made thy Lawes In writing, such, as catch’d at present voyce, I should commend the thing, but not thy choyse. But thou hast squar’d thy rules, by what is good; And art three Ages yet, from understood: And (I dare say) in it, there lies much Wit Lost, till thy Readers can grow up to it. Which they can nere outgrow, to find it ill, But must fall backe againe, or like it still. (Sig. [A3]v) (d) John Fletcher, ‘To his worthy friend Mr Ben. Jonson’.

He, that dares wrong this Play, it should appeare Dares utter more, then other men dare heare, That have their wits about ’hem: yet such men, Deare friend, must see your Booke, and reade; and then, Out of their learned ignorance, crie ill, And lay you by, calling for mad Pasquill, Or Greene’s deare Groatsworth, or Tom Coryate, The new Lexicon, with the errant Pate; And picke away, from all these severall ends, And durtie ones, to make their as-wise friends Beleeve they are translaters. Of this, pitty, There is a great plague hanging o’re the Citty: Unlesse she purge judgement presently. But, O thou happy man, that must not die As these things shall: leaving no more behind But a thin memory (like a passing wind) That blowes, and is forgotten, ere they are cold. Thy labours shall out live thee; and, like gold Stampt for continuance, shall be currant, where There is a Sunne, a People, or a Yeare. (Sig. [A3]v–[A4]r) (e) Nathaniel Field, ‘To his worthy beloved friend Mr BEN. JONSON’.

Field (1587–1633) was one of the six principal comedians of the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, who performed Cynthia’s Revels in 1600; he acted in Poetaster in

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 107

1601. He was befriended by Jonson and tutored by him; he records his gratitude to Jonson for his ‘grave instructions philosophicall’ in a commendatory verse to Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1610). Jonson pays him the compliment of having Cokes ask in Bartholomew Fair about ‘Your best Actor. Your Field?’ (5.3.88). Field contributed a commendatory verse to the 1607 quarto of Volpone. He wrote plays himself from about 1610 on. Had the great thoughts of Catiline bene good, The memory of his name, streame of his bloud, His plots past into acts, (which would have turn’d His Infamy to Fame, though Rome had burn’d) Had not begot him equall grace with men, As this, that he is writ by such a Pen: Whose inspirations, if great Rome had had, Her good things had bene better’d, and her bad Undone; the first for joy, the last for feare. That such a Muse should spread them, to our Yeare. But woe to us then: for thy laureat brow If Rome enjoy’d had, we had wanted now. But, in this Age, where Jigs and Dances move, How few there are, that this pure worke approve! Yet, better then I rayle at, thou canst scorne Censures, that die, ere they be throughly borne. Each Subject thou, still thee each Subject rayses. And whosoever thy Book, himselfe disprayses. (Sig. [A4]r)

108

24. John Selden on Jonson’s scholarship 1614

From the preface to Titles of Honor (1614). Jonson has a commendatory poem, ‘To His Honord Friend Mr. John Selden Health,’ prefixed to the volume. Selden argues in the body of the book that, contrary to received opinion, crowns were not anciently regarded as specifically royal attributes (Part i, pp. 135–54). He there disputes the reading of the Greek scholiast Arsenius which suggests that Euripides refers to a crown in Orestes in connection with Atreus (Orestes, ll. 12–13). This extract from his preface describes his looking up Arsenius in Jonson’s library and discussing the problem with him. In 1631, in the second edition of Titles of Honor, Selden added a section on poetic laurels, included, he says, to fulfil a promise to his ‘beloved’ Jonson; he compliments Jonson’s ‘curious learning and judgment’ and tells him that in the matter of the laurel crown of poets ‘you both fully know what concernes it, and your singular Excellencie in the Art most eminently deserves it’ (pp. 411–12). [Selden mentions the reference in Orestes.] …which, when I was to use, and not having at hand the Scholiast (out of whom I hoped some aid) I went, for this purpose, to see it in the well-furnisht Librarie of my beloved friend that singular Poet M.Ben: Jonson, whose speciall Worth in Literature, accurate Judgment, and Performance, known only to that Few which are truly able to know him, hath had from me, ever since I began to learn, an increasing admiration. Having examin’d it with him, I resolved upon my first Opinion, and found, as I ghesse, a New but more proper Interpretation of the Place…. (Sig. dr-v)

110

25. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair 1614

Acted in 1614; first published in 1631 in volume ii of Jonson’s Workes. (a) ‘The Prologue to the Kings Majesty’. Your Majesty is welcome to a Fayre; Such place, such men, such language & such ware, You must expect: with these, the zealous noyse Of your lands Faction, scandaliz’d at toyes, As Babies, Hobby-horses, Puppet-playes, And such like rage, whereof the petulant wayes Your selfe have knowne, and have bin vext with long. These for your sport, without perticular wrong, Or just complaint of any private man, (Who of himselfe, or shall thinke well or can) The Maker doth present: and hopes to night To give you for a Fayring, true delight. (Sig. A3r) (b) From ‘The Induction on the Stage’.

In the first part of the Induction, the Stage-Keeper gives the audience his views on the deficiencies of the play to come; he is chased off the stage by the Book-HolderScrivener who reads the articles drawn up by the playwright for an agreement between himself and the audience; the play is announced as ‘a new sufficient Play called BARTHOLOMEW FAYRE, merry, and as full of noise, as sport: made to delight all, and to offend none’ (Sig. [A5]r). The last portion of the Induction, given here, offers some instructive direct and indirect comment on the nature of the play, as well as the much quoted glance at The Tempest. It is further covenanted, concluded and agreed, that how great soever the expectation bee, no person here, is to expect more then hee knowes, or better ware than a Fayre will affoord: neyther to looke backe to the sword and buckler-age of Smithfield, but content himselfe with the present. In stead of a little Davy, to take toll o’the Bawds, the Author doth promise a strutting Horse-courser, with a leere-Drunkard, two or three to attend him, in as good Equipage as you would wish. And then for Kinde-heart, the Tooth-drawer, a fine oyly Pig-woman with her Tapster, to bid you welcome, and a consort of Roarers for

112 BEN JONSON

musique. A wise Justice of Peace meditant, in stead of a Jugler, with an Ape. A civill Catpurse searchant. A sweete Singer of new Ballads allurant: and as fresh an Hypocrite, as ever was broach’d rampant. If there bee never a Servant-monster i’the Fayre; who can help it? he sayes; nor a nest of antiques? Hee is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries, to mixe his head with other mens heeles; let the concupisence of Jigges and Dances, raigne as strong as it will amongst you: yet if the Puppets will please any body, they shall be entreated to come in. In consideration of which, it is finally agreed, by the foresaid hearers, and spectators, that they neyther in themselves conceale, nor suffer by them to be concealed any Statedecipherer, or politique Picklocke of the Scene, so solemnly ridiculous, as to search out, who was meant by the Ginger-bread-woman, who by the Hobby-horse-man, who by the Costardmonger, nay, who by their Wares. Or that will pretend to affirme (on his owne inspired ignorance) what Mirror of Magistrates is meant by the Justice, what great Lady by the Piggewoman, what conceal’d States-man, by the Seller of Mouse-trappes, and so of the rest. But that such person, or persons so found, be left discovered to the mercy of the Author, as a forfeiture to the Stage, and your laughter, aforesaid. As also, such as shall so desperately, or ambitiously, play the foole by his place aforesaid, to challenge the Author of scurrilitie, because the language some where savours of Smithfield, the Booth, and the Pig-broath, or of prophanenesse, because a Mad-man cryes, God quit you, or blesse you. In witnesse whereof, as you have preposterously put to your Seales already (which is your money) you will now adde the other part of suffrage, your hands, The Play shall presently begin. And though the Fayre be not kept in the same Region, that some here, perhaps, would have it, yet thinke, that therein the Author hath observ’d a speciall Decorum, the place being as durty as Smithfield, and as stinking every whit. Howsoever, hee prayes you to beleeve, his Ware is still the same, else you will make him justly suspect that hee that is so loth to looke on a Baby, or an Hobby-horse, heere, would bee glad to take up a Commodity of them, at any laughter, or losse, in another place. (Sig. [A5]v–[A6]v)

26. On Jonson’s epigrams 1615

An epigram entitled ‘Scribimus indocti doctique epigrammata passim’ (‘Skilled or unskilled, we scribble poetry, all alike’: Horace, Epistles, 2.1.117), in a collection made by ‘R.C., Gent’ and titled ‘The Times Whistle, or a newe Daunce of Seven Satires, whereunto are annexed divers other poems comprising things naturall, morall, and theologicall’, in the Library of Canterbury Cathedral (Literary Manuscript D10). J.M.Couper, in the introduction to his edition of the manuscript, The Times Whistle, or a new Daunce of Seven Satires, and other Poems (1871), suggests a date of 1615 for the collection (pp. x–xiii); the present poem apparently refers to a printed version of Jonson’s epigrams, and to the dedication to them which appears in the 1616 folio (compare line 9 with No. 29(e), below). This would suggest that the writer had seen the 1616 volume, though it is possible there was an earlier separate printed version or MS of the epigrams (discussed in H & S, viii, 16, and xi, 356). The reference to a pamphlet suggests such a publication, rather than the imposing folio of 1616. Johnson, they say, ’s turnd Epigrammatist Soe think not I, believe it they that list. Peruse his booke, thou shall not find a dram Of witt, befitting a true Epigram. Perhaps some scraps of play-bookes thou maist see, Collected heer & there confusedlie, Which piece his broken stuffe, if thou but note, Just like soe many patches on a cote. And yet his intret Cato sta[n]ds before, Even at the portall of his pamphlets dore, As who should say, this booke is fit for none, But Catoes, learned men to looke upon: Or else, let Cato censure if he will, My booke deserves the best of judgement skill. When every gull may see his booke’s untwitten, And Epigrams as bad as ere were written. Johnson this worke thy other doth distaine, And makes the world imagine that thy vein

114 BEN JONSON

Is not true bred, but of some bastard race, Then write no more, or write with better grace, Turne thee to plaies & therin write thy fill, Leave Epigrams to artists of more skill, (fol. 91r)

27. William Fennor on the reception of Sejanus 1616

From ‘The Description of a Poet’, in Fennors Descriptions, Or A True Relation of certaine and divers speeches, spoken before the King and Queenes most excellent Majestie, the Prince his highnesse, and the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace (1616). The reception of Sejanus is Fennor’s example of the poet’s sad fate of being judged by the multitude (his poem begins, ‘A Poets life is most unfortunate…’). Fennor describes himself on the title-page as ‘His Majesties Servant’. [A murderer, or a thief, is given a trial by twelve men charged with clearing any doubts about rash judgement.] …But sweet Poesye Is oft convict, condem’d, and judg’d to die Without just triall, by a multitude Whose judgements are illiterate, and rude. Witnesse Scejanus, whose approved worth, Sounds from the calme South, to the freezing North. And on the perfum’d wings of Zepherus, In triumph mounts as farre as Æolus, With more then humane art it was bedewed, Yet to the multitude it nothing shewed; They screwed their scurvy jawes and look’t awry, Like hissing snakes adjudging it to die: When wits of gentry did applaud the same, With Silver shouts of high lowd sounding fame: Whil’st understanding grounded men contemn’d it, And wanting wit (like fooles to judge) condemn’d it. Clapping, or hissing, is the onely meane That tries and searches out a well writ Sceane. So is it thought by Ignoramus crew, But that good wits acknowledge’s untrue; The stinckards oft will hisse without a cause, And for a baudy jeast will give applause. Let one but aske the reason why they roare

116 BEN JONSON

They’l answere, cause the rest did so before. But leaving these who for their just reward, Shall gape, and gaze, amongst the fooles in th’ yard. (Sig. B2r-v)

28. Robert Anton, Jonson among the melancholic creators 1616

From The Philosophers Satyrs (1616). In his sixth satire Anton considers the activities in Mercury’s sphere, those of wit and the arts. He attacks literary efforts inspired by ‘phantasticke humors’, smoke, wine and other artificial stimulants and declares his admiration for the products of ‘arts and deeper skill’ (p. 59), and of the melancholic temperament. Anton graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1609–10; he is also the author of a prose tract, Moriomachia (1613). The chollericke complexion hot and drie, Writes with a Scriants hand most gripingly. The Phlegmaticke in such a waterie vaine, As if some (riming-Sculler) got his straine. But the sound melancholicke mixt of earth, Plowes with his wits, and brings a sollid birth: The labor’d lines of some deepe reaching Scull, Is like some Indian ship or stately hull, That three yeares progresse furrows up the maine.… ⋆⋆⋆ [Beaumont and Spenser are cited first, then] The labor’d Muse of Johnson, in whose loome His silke-worme stile shall build an honor’d toombe In his owne worke: though his long curious twins Hang in the roofe of time with daintie lines: Greeke-thundring Chapman beaten to the age With a deepe furie and a sollid rage. And Morrall Daniell with his pleasing phrase, Filing the rockie methode of these daies. (p. 64)

118

29. From The Workes of Benjamin Jonson 1616

On this, the first of the folio collections of Jonson’s works, see Introduction, p. 11. (a) John Selden, ‘Ad V[irum] CL[arissimum] Ben. Ionsonium, Carmen protrepticon’ (To the most noble Ben Jonson, A hortatory poem’). Translated. Let Neanthus strike the snatched lyre of the Thracian. Let Palaemon write songs in circles. The man who sacrifices to the Goddesses with unwashed hands, let him fear Probus. You like pleasing learned ears, you like pleasing few. When with full attention I was reading your poems (for your poems demand one’s full attention; they are not for a lazy reader) and when I saw the rhythm, intelligence, skill, wonderful judgement, which, O Jonson, the critic himself, even if excessively prejudiced, would demand if he were at the same time a learned man, and when I saw the fine style and the wit worthy of Mercury, and the new ideas but old moral standards; whatever dramatic work of yours I read was within your competence; it would always be so, and you had spoken so that Lemnos was not so famous for its clay, and Apis made sacred by his spot, was not so famous, and Venus was not so famous for her girdle, or Apollo for his long hair, as you will be famous for your learned poetry, as a bright star by its rays surpasses the brightness of lesser stars. I remembered the saying of Stolo, that the Muses would have used Plautus’ Latin, and I remembered Cicero’s saying, that the son of Saturn would have used Plato’s Greek, if the Muses had been speaking in Latium and Jupiter had been speaking in Athens. Now I think that Jupiter and the Muses would have used Jonson’s verse if they had been speaking to the English. You teach wisdom so pleasantly. You strew and scatter pleasant things so wisely. But among so many pleasures, one thing is not pleasing: the fact that the bookbinder’s board has separated them among so many volumes. I wanted one volume, which future generations of Englishmen would read and reread. The band and company of those who love poetry desire this, and whatever of your labours remains still preserved in your desk. But we seem to seek glory not so much for you as for ourselves, while we desire eagerly the unpublished writings of a man who openly deserves so many laurel wreaths; while we dare to separate you and your poems from the number tasting of bitten fingernails [i.e. from over-careful writers], as the old critics separated the muses from both sirens and cicadas; while we seem able to separate you, we seek a new book, a sacred one which will not be assailed in any age, will not grow old in any age, it will be a splendid Second Edition; so that at the same time it will be thought that we too knew something. Good luck to you. Let us consecrate it to you like a sacrifice to the gods, in order that we may have good fortune. May a fresher ivy wreath and new splendour crown

120 BEN JONSON

your head. The English race could one day be eternal and proud of your merits. The men who envy your country and you this great wreath are merely those who want to abolish literature altogether; being obscure, they fear the excessive brightness of Jonson. (Sig. ¶ 3v– [¶ 4]r) (b) Edward Hayward, ‘To Ben. Jonson, on his workes’.

Edward Hayward (or Heyward) of the Inner Temple (d. 1658) had been praised by Jonson in ‘An Epistle to Master John Selden’ as Selden’s ‘learned chamber-fellow’; Jonson there rejoices in his friendship with the two men (Und., 14, ll 70–82). Selden’s Titles of Honor (see No. 24, above) was dedicated to Hayward. May I subscribe a name? dares my bold quill Write that or good or ill, Whose frame is of that height, that, to mine eye, Its head is in the sky? Yes. Since the most censures, beleeves, and saith By an implicit faith: Least their misfortune make them chance amisse, I’le waft them right by this. Of all I know thou onely art the man That dares but what he can: Yet by performance showes he can do more Then hath bene done before, Or will be after. (Such assurance gives Perfection where it lives.) Words speake thy matter; matter fills thy words; And choyce that grace affords That both are best: and both most fitly plac’t, Are with new VENUS grac’t From artfull method, all in this point meet, With good to mingle sweet. These are thy lower parts. what stands above Who sees not yet must love, When on the Base he reads BEN. JONSONS name, And heares the rest from Fame. This from my love of truth: which payes this due To your just worth, not you. (Sig. [¶ 4]v) (c) Francis Beaumont, ‘Upon the Silent Woman’.

Further evidence of the emphasis on the moral purpose of Jonsonian comedy in the critical comment of the time. Heare you bad writers, and though you not see, I will informe you where you happy bee: Provide the most malicious thoughts you can, And bend them all against some private man,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 121

To bring him, not his vices, on the stage, Your envie shall be clad in so poore rage, And your expressing of him shall be such, That he himselfe shall thinke he hath no touch. Where he that strongly writes, although he meane To scourge but vices in a labour’d scene, Yet private faults shall be so well exprest As men doe act ’hem, that each private brest, That findes these errors in itselfe shall say, He meant me, not my vices, in the play. (Sig. [¶ 6]v) (d) Jonson’s dedication of Sejanus to Lord Aubigny.

Jonson lodged with Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny (1574– 1624), for five years, between 1603 and 1607; Epig., 27 is addressed to him. MY LORD, If ever any ruine were so great, as to survive; I thinke this be one I send you: the Fal of Sejanus. It is a poente, that (if I well remember) in your Lo. sight, suffer’d no lesse violence from our people here, then the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome; but, with a different fate, as (I hope) merit: For this hath out-liv’d their malice, and begot it selfe a greater favour then he lost, the love of good men. Amongst whom, if I make your Lo. the first it thankes, it is not without a just confession of the bond your benefits have, and ever shall hold upon me. Your Lo. most faithfull honorer, BEN. JONSON. (p. 357) (e) Jonson’s dedication of the Epigrams to William, Earl of Pembroke. Jonson had dedicated Catiline to Pembroke in the 1611 quarto (see No. 23(a), above). TO THE GREAT EXAMPLE OF HONOR AND VERTUE, THE MOST NOBLE WILLIAM, EARLE OF PEMBROKE, L.CHAMBERLAYNE, &C. MY LORD. While you cannot change your merit, I dare not change your title: It was that made it and not I. Under which name, I here offer to you Lo: the ripest of my studies, my Epigrammes; which, though they carry danger in the sound, doe not therefore seeke your shelter: For, when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher. But, if I be falne into those times, wherein, for the likeness of vice, and facts, every one thinks anothers ill deeds objected to him; and that in their ignorant and guiltie mouthes, the common voyce is (for their securitie) Beware the Poet, confessing, therein, so much love to their diseases, as they would rather make a partie for them, then be either rid, or told of them: I must expect, at your Lo: hand, the protection of truth, and libertie, while you are constant to your owne goodnesse. In thankes whereof, I returne you the honor of leading forth so many good, and great names (as my verses mention on the better part) to their remembrance with posteritie. Amongst whom, if I have praysed, unfortunately, any one that doth not deserve; or, if all answere not, in all numbers, the pictures I have made of them: I hope it will be forgiven me, that they are no ill pieces, though they be not like the persons. But I foresee a neerer fate to my booke, then this: that the vices therein will be own’d before the vertues (though, there, I have avoyded all particulars, as I have done names) and that some will be so readie to discredit

122 BEN JONSON

me, as they will have the impudence to belye themselves. For, if I meant them not, it is so. Nor, can I hope otherwise. For, why should they remit any thing of their riot, their pride, their selfe-love, and other inherent graces, to consider truth or vertue; but, with the trade of the world, lend their long eares against men they love not: and hold their deare Mountebanke, or Jester, in farre better condition, then all the studie, or studiers of humanitie? For such, I would rather know them by their visards, still, then they should publish their faces, at their perill; in my Theater, where CATO, if he liv’d, might enter without scandall. Your Lo: most faithfull honorer, BEN. JONSON. (pp. 767–8)

30. William Drummond, Jonson’s character 1619

The summary at the end of the notes on his conversations with Jonson, printed from H & S, i, 151. January 19. 1619. He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and Scorner of others, given rather to losse a friend, than a Jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especiallie after drink) which is one of the Elements in which he liveth) a dissembler of ill parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth, thinketh nothing well bot what either he himself, or some of his friends and Countrymen hath said or done, he is passionately kynde and angry, carelesse either to gaine or keep, Vindicative, but if he be well answered, at himself, for any religion as being versed in both, interpreteth best sayings and deeds often to the worst: oppressed with fantasie, which hath ever mastered his reason, a generall disease in many poets, his inventions are smooth and easie, but above all he excelleth in a translation, when his Play of a Silent woman was first acted, ther was found Verses after on the stage against him, concluding that, that play was well named the Silent Woman. ther was never one man to say plaudite to it Finis

124

31. Inigo Jones, attack on Jonson 1619 or later

‘To his false freind mr: Ben Johnson’, from B.L.Harley MS 6057, composed after Jonson returned from Scotland in 1619. H & S, xi, 386, amend l. 13 to read ‘no ill thou couldst so taske dwells not [in thee]’. Jones (1573–1652) designed the settings for twelve of Jonson’s masques, from The Masque of Blackness, performed at the beginning of 1605, shortly after Jones returned from Italy, to Chloridia (1631). In 1631 the two men quarrelled openly over who was to have precedence as creator of the masques. Jonson wrote an ‘Expostulation’ with Jones, and epigrams on him (U.V., 34, 35, 36) and caricatured him as In-and-in Medlay in A Tale of a Tub (first recorded performance 1634) and as Iniquo Vitruvius in Loves Welcome at Bolsover (1634). On Jones’s side, as well as the poem below, there is a marginal annotation associating Jonson with a character from tragedy stupefied with happiness at the applause of the mob, printed in Anthony Johnson, ‘Ben Jonson: An Ungathered Allusion’, Notes and Queries (1986), n.s. xxxiii, 384–5. Jones’s phrase ‘the best of Poetts but the worst of men’ appears several times in connection with Jonson in Charles Stanhope’s marginalia in a copy of the 1640 folio of Jonson’s works, as well as in other books he owned (James M.Osborn, ‘Ben Jonson and the Eccentric Lord Stanhope’, The Times Literary Supplement, 4 January 1957, p. 16, and G.P.V. Akrigg, ‘The Curious Marginalia of Charles, Second Lord Stanhope’, Adams Memorial Studies, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948, pp. 785–802). Sixe daies are done with endlesse hopes since I had with expectance of thy honesty thought of my thanks to be delivered free which soe longe I have travaild for with thee but thy neglect hath chaung’d the happier fate and made thy birth abortive turne to hate whose language like thy nature now must prove and blame itt not you might have Taught itt love I wonder howe you ever durst invay In Satire. Epigram, or Libell-play against the manners of the tyme, or men in full examples of all mischeifes when no ill thou couldst soe staske dwells not mee and there the store house of your plottes wee see.

126 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

for thou that hast in thee soe many waies of practizd mischief, hast begott thy bayes in reading of thy selfe, ticklinge the age stealinge all equal glory from the stage that I confesse with like forme thou hast writt of good and badd things not with equall witt the reason is, or may be quickly showne the goods translation butt the ills thyne owne for though with tired pace & sweaty feete I never went to Scotland nor did meete thee att returne my selfe alone or with my friends but soe far of a[s] Hamersmith yet I ofte unto your Jurnes glory with patience heard you tell the teadious story of all you in that trafficke suffered thoughe I was as tyr’d as thou couldst bee to goe Besides I have beene druncke with thee & then satt still and heard the[e] rayle at other men repeat thy verses, and done all that might make my Succession to thy hart be right And t’other daie I gave thee stile & woordes preferd thee in thy Choise before great Lordes But thou hast proved nowe by this neglect less worthy then that groome my disrespect heere Charected unto the life for hee deceiv’d no trust which murthered is by thee from henceforth this repute dwell with the[e] then the best of Poettes but the worst of men (fol. 30r-v)

32. Edmund Bolton on Jonson’s language 1621

From Hypercritica, first printed by Anthony Hall in his Nicolai Triveti Annalium Continuatio; ut et Adami Murimuthensis Chroni-con… (Oxford 1722). Bolton’s work is a guide to the writing of English history; in this section he is discussing poets as models for English style. Thomas H.Blackburn, ‘The Date and Evolution of Bolton’s Hypercritica’, Studies in Philology (1966), lxiii, 196–202, establishes a date of 1621 for the full version of the Hypercritica. Bodleian MS Rawlinson D1 contains what Blackburn (p. 201) suggests is a late emendation of an early outline of the work; it lists Jonson among the authors suitable as models for the English language. It was printed (along with a reprint of Hall’s version) by Joseph Haslewood, in Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy (1815), ii, 246–7n. In verse there are Ed. Spencer’s Hymns. I cannot advise the allowance of other his Poems, as for practick English, no more than I can do Jeff. Chaucer, Lydgate, Peirce Ploughman, or Laureat Skelton. It was laid as a fault to the charge of Salust, that he used some old outworn Words, stoln out of Cato his Books de Originibus. And for an Historian in our Tongue to affect the like out of those our Poets would be accounted a foul Oversight. That therefore must not be, unless perhaps we cite the Words of some old Monument, as Livy cites Carmen Martium, or as other Latins might alledge Pacuvius, Andronicus, or Laws of the Twelve Tables, or what else soever of the ancients. My judgment is nothing at all in Poems, or Poesie, and therefore I dare not go far, but will simply deliver my Mind concerning those Authours among us, whose English hath in my Conceit most propriety, and is nearest to the Phrase of Court, and to the Speech used among the noble, and among the better sort in London; the two sovereign Seats, and as it were Parliament tribunals to try the question in. ⋆⋆⋆ [Bolton recommends some or all the poems of Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Queen Elizabeth, Southwell, and Constable; The Mirror of Magistrates and Gorboduc; and poems by Surrey, Wyatt, Raleigh, Donne, Hugh Holland and Fulke Greville. He concludes:]

128 BEN JONSON

But if I should declare mine own Rudeness rudely, I should then confess, that I never tasted English more to my liking, nor more smart, and put to the height of Use in Poetry, then in that vital judicious, and most practicable Language of Benjamin Jonson’s Poems. (235–7)

33. George Chapman, expostulation with Jonson 1623 or later

‘An Invective Wrighten…against Mr Ben: Jonson’, from Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 38. Apparently a response to Jonson’s ‘An Execration upon Vulcan’, written after the fire of 1623, and which Chapman must have seen in manuscript. Chapman had obviously turned against Jonson since the commendatory poem to Sejanus (No. 16 (b), above). There is much in the poem that is obscure, but it is remarkable for its indignation at what Chapman sees as Jonson’s pretensions—suggesting, for example, that the works he claimed were destroyed by fire existed only in his imagination (p. 138, below) —and at the cult of Jonson among his learned admire [r]s (pp. 135, 138, below). Greate-Learned wittie-Ben: be pleas’d to light the world with that three-forked fire; Nor fright All us thy sublearn’d with Luciferous Boast that thou art most-greate-most-learn’d-wittie most of all the kingdome; nay of all the earth As being a thing betwixtt a humane birth and an Infernall; No humanitye Of the devine soule shewing Man In the[e] Being all of pride composde and surcudrie Thus ytt might Argue; yf thy petulant will May Flieblowe all men with thy great swans Quill If itt Cann wright noe playes; yf thy plaies fayle All the Earnests of our Kingdome straight must vaile To thy wilde furie; that, as yf a feinde Had sleipte his Cirkell; showste thy brest is splend Frisking so madly that gaynst Towne and Courte Thow plant’st thy battrie In most hedious Sorte If thy pied humours suffer least empaire And any vapour vex the virulent Ayre The Dunkerkes keepe not our Cole ships In awe More then thy Moods are thy Admire[r]s Law— All eles, as well the grafflers of thy pawes with panicke Terrors flie bedred of cause

130 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

And sett the swinish Itche of thy fell wreake Rub gainst the presence Royall without Checke How must state use the[e] yf thy vaines thus leake Thou must be Muzzelde Ringd and lett In Chaines Lest dames with childe a bide untymely paynes and Children perrish: didst thou not put out A boies Right eye that Croste thy mankind poute yf all this you find perdone Fee and grace The happiest outlaw th’art that ever was Goodnes to virtue is a godlike thinge And man with god Joynes in a good doing kinge But to give vice hur Name, and on all his (As her puer Merritts) to Confer all this who will not argue itt redounds, what ever vice is sustayned with all, turnes pestilent fever what norishes vertue, ever more Converts To blood and sperritts of nothing but deserts And shall a viper hanging on hur hand by his owne poyson his full swindge Commande How shall grave virtue sperritt her honord fame yf Mottlye mockerye maie dispose her shame Never soe dully? Nor with such a dust And Clouted Choller? tis the foulest lust That ever yett did violate actions Just. But yf this weighd, proud vile and saucie sperritt Depraveing everye exemplarye merritt May itt nought lesse all his fatt hopes Inheritt When men turne Harpies, theire bloods standing lakes Greene bellied Serpents, and blacke freckled Snakes Crawling In their unwelldye Clottered waves Their tongues growne forked, and thair sorcerous pens Like pickturs prickt, and hid In smoaking dunghills Vext with the Sunn, tis tyme I thinke to banish And Cast out such unhallowedly dysloyall From bloods thrice sacred and devinely Royall Thers an Invention Mountibancke enough to make petars to blow upp mens good names Virtues and Dignities for vices pleasure; Take but an Idle and Rediculous Crew Of base back biters that ytt never knew Virtue or worth to manage; great flesh flies Slight all the Clere and sound partes whear thay pass And dwell uppon the soares; and Call to them The Common learned, gatherer of poysons for envied Merritts that hee Cannott æquall And let hym gleane from Malice and foule mouthes Devices long since donn and sett them downe With splene stupide and dead as brutish restes

BEN JONSON 131

Transforming all most wrathfull fumes to Jests Letting the king his Royall eare allowe; And thers a reputation, broke as smale And with as maygtye Arguments lett fall As the Greeke Mans’ pure bodies Genitall. So that yf scandalls false beare free their sprite All guiltles formes, are forc’t with rape and flight And shall all other Raisers of their names T’aires highes Region, buy such short-winged fames Hould not their titles, and whole states like tenures May wee not humblest things with highest rate And least with greatest, whear right must Moderate Now to your partes Calde good; your sacred deske (The wooden fountayne of the Mightye Muses) (Ah las) is burned; and their all their wealth faylde (That never Cann with all tyme be retaylde Why then as good not name them) yes, O yes Tenn tymes repeated will all brave things please, Not with theire Titles yett, and pore selfe prayses. Hee lives yett (heaven be praysed) that Can wright In his ripe yeares much better, and new borne In spight of Vulcan, whome all true pens scorne Yett lett me name them in meane tyme to Chere his greddie followers with a prickt up eare Itt does him selfe ease and why them no good Come serve ytt in then give hime goulden food. Noe Bodie (hee dares saie) yet have sound parts Of profound search and Mastrie In the artes1 And perfect then his English Grammare too To teach some what thayr nurses could not doe The puritie of Language, and Amonge The rest; his Journye Into Scotland songe And twice twelve years storde upp humanitie With humble gleanings in Devenytye After the fathers and those wiser guides That faction had not drawne to steddie sides Canst thou lose theise by fire; and live yet able To wright past Joves wrath, fier and Ayre things stable Yet Curse as thou wert lost for everye bable Some pore thinge wright new; a Riche Caskett Ben All of riche Jems t’adore most learned men Or a Reclaime of most Jacete supposes To teach full habited-men to blowe their noses Make the king merrie; would’st thou now be knowne The Devill and the Vice, and both In one Thow doest things backwards, are man thought to knowe Mastries in th’arts with saying they doe soe And criing fire out In a dreame to kings

132 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Burne things unborne, and that way generate things Wright some new Lactean way to thy highe presence And make not ever thy strong fancie essence To all thou wouldst be thought on all worlds worth; Or eles like Hercules Furens breaking forth Biting the grene—cloth,2 as a doge a stone, And for ridiculous shaddow of the bone Hazard the substance; will thy fortune still (Spight of all learning) backe the witt thy will Though thy playe genius, hange his broken wing Full of sicke feathers, and with forced things Imp thy scænes, Labord and Unnaturall And nothing good Comes with thy thrice vext Call Comes thou not yet: nor yet? O no, Nor yett Yet are thy learnd Admire[r]s so deep sett In thy preferment above all that Cite The sunn in challendge for the heate and light Of bothe heavens Influences which of you tow knewe And have most power In them; Greate Ben tis you Examine hime some truely Judging sperritt, That pride nor fortune hath to blind his merritt Hee matcht with all booke-fiers hee ever read His Deske poore Candle Rents; his owne fat head With all the learnd worlds; Alexanders flame That Cæsars Conquest Cowd, and stript his fame, he shames Not to give reckoning In for with his: As yf the king perdoning his petulencies Should paie his huge loss to in such a skore As all earths learned fiers hee gather’d for. What thinkest thow (Just frind) equalde not this pride All yet that ever, Hell or heaven defied? And yet for all this, this Clube will Inflict His faultfull paine, and him enough Convicte Hee onlye reading showed; Learning, nor witt; Onlye Dame Gilians fier his Deske will fitt but for his shift by fier to save the Lose Of his vast Learning; this may prove ytt grose True Muses ever, vent breathes mixt with fier Which, formed In Numbers, they In flames expire Not onlye flames kindl’d with thayr owne blest breath That give the unborne Life; and eternise death. Great Ben: I knowe what this is In thy hand, And how thou fixt on heavens fixt starre dost stand In all mens admirations and Comande. for all that can be scribled gainst the sortes of thy drad Repurcussions and Reportes, the Kingdome yeldes not such another man wounder of men hee is; the player Cann

BEN JONSON 133

and bookeseller prove true; yf thay could knowe Onlye on[e] dropp, that drives In such A flowe Are thay not learned beasts, the better farr Theire drossie exhalations, A starr theire brainles Admirations may render. For Learning In the wise sort is but Lender Of mens prime Notions Doctrine their owne way Of all skills preciptible formes A key Forging to wealth, and Honor soothed sence Never exploring truth or Consequence Informing any vertue or good Life And therefore Plaier, Bookseller, or wife Of eyther, (needing no such curiouse key) All men and things, may knowe their owne rude way Imagination and our appetite Forming our speach no easier then thay lighte All letterles Companions; t’all thay know Here or here after that like earths sonns plowe All underworlds and ever downewards growe Nor lett your learnings think egredious Ben: Thes letterles Companions are not men With all the Arts and Sciences Indued If of mans true and worthiest knowledge rude Which is to knowe and be, one Compleat man And that not all the swelling Ocean Of Artes and sciences, cann poure both In If that brave skill, then when thou didst begine to studdye letters, thy great wit had plide Freelye and onlye thy Disease of pride In vulgar praise, had never bound thy,3 (16–18)

NOTES 1 A marginal note in the manuscript here says, ‘Wm then Lord Chamberlayne and Earl of Pemb. made him M[aste]r of Arts with his Letter.’ The ceremony took place in Oxford in 1619. 2 The board of control of the King’s Household. Jonson complains of its failure to give him his allowance of sack in Und., 68. 3 At the end of the text in the MS there is the note, ‘More then this never came to my hands, but lost in his sicknes.’

134

34. Ben Jonson on The Staple of News 1626

‘The Prologue for the Court’ to the play, which was first acted in 1626, and printed in 1631 in volume ii of Jonson’s Workes. There is also an Induction to the play, and a separate prologue ‘for the Stage’. A Worke not smelling of the Lampe, to night, But fitted for your Majesties disport, And writ to the Meridian of your Court, Wee bring; and hope it may produce delight: The rather, being offered, as a Rite To Schollers, that can judge, and faire report The sense they heare, above the vulgar sort Of Nut-crackers, that onely come for sight. Wherein, although our Title, Sir, be Newes. Wee yet adventure, here, to tell you none; But shew you common follies, and so knowne, That though they are not truths, th’innocent Muse Hath made so like, as Phant’sie could them state, Or Poetry, without scandall, imitate. (6)

136

35. Nicholas Oldisworth on Jonson 1629

‘A Letter to Ben Johnson. 1629’, from Oldisworth’s autograph collection of his poems in the Bodleian (MS Don. C. 24, dated 1644). Oldisworth, a Gloucestershire clergyman, was Sir Thomas Overbury’s nephew (see Ian Donaldson, ‘Jonson and the Moralists’, in Alvin Kernan (ed.), Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson (Baltimore, Md. 1977), pp. 162, 164n). Jonson included the poem (with some variants, and two added lines) in what he called ‘a packet of my own praises’, sent to the Earl of Newcastle on 4 February 1632 (the letter and copies of poems in praise are Harley MS 4955 in the British Library). The Harley version is printed in Wit Restor’d in Several Select Poems not formerly Publish’t (1658), pp. 79–81. In another poem in MS Don. C. 24— quoted in H & S, i, 113n—Oldisworth describes a visit to Jonson in Westminster on a journey from London to Southampton in 1632; Jonson, far from giving his visitors the flashes of fantastic wit they expect, talks of nothing but ‘how Mankinde grew daily worse and worse, /How God was disregarded, How Men went/Downe even to Hell, and never did repent....’. Die Johnson: crosse not our Religion so, As to bee thought immortall. Lett us know Thou art a Man. Thy workes make us mistake Thy person; and thy great Creations make Us idol thee, and ’cause wee see thee doe Eternall thynges, thinke Thee eternall too. Restore us to our Faith, and die. Thy doome Will doe as much good, as the Fall of Rome, ’Twill crush an Heresie: wee n’er must hope For truth, till two bee gone, Thou and the Pope. And though wee are in danger, by thy Fall To loose our Witts, our Judgements (braines and all) Wee are content thou shouldst besott us thus. Better bee fooles, then superstitious. Die: to what Ende should wee thee now adore? There is not Scholarship to reach to more. Our Language is refin’d: Professours doubt

138 BEN JONSON

Their Greek and Hebrew shall be both putt out; And wee, that Latine studyed have so long, Shall now dispute, and write, in Johnson’s tongue. Nay, courtiers yeeld: and every beauteous wench Had rather speake thy English, then her French. And for our Mater! Nature stands agast, Wondring to see her strength thus best at last; Invention stoppes her course, and bidds the world Looke for noe more: shee hath already hurld Her treasure all on one. Thou has out-done So much our Wish and Expectation, That were it not for Thee, wee scarce had known Fancie it selfe could ere so farre have gone. Give lit’rature (a while) Leave to admire How shee gott so high: shee can gett noe higher. Die: seemes it not enough thy Writings date Is endlesse, but thine owne prolonged Fate Must equall it? for shame, engross not Age, But now, thy fifth Act’s ended, leave the stage, And lett us clappe. Wee know, the Stars, which doe Give others one Life, give a Laureat two: But thou, if thus thy Bodie long survives, Hast two Eternities, and not two Lives. Die, for thine owne sake. Seest thou not, thy Praise Is shortned meerly by this length of dayes? Men may talke this, and that: to part the strife, If I may judge, thou hast noe fault, but life. Cold authors please best. Mee thinks thy warm Breath Casts a thick Mist before thy Worth; which, Death Would quickly dissipate. If thou wouldst have Thy baies to flourish, plant them on thy Grave. Gold now is drosse, and Oracles are stuffe With us: for why? thou art not low enough, Wee still looke under thee: stoope, and submitt Thy glorie to the Meanesse of our Witt. The Rhodian colossus, ere it fell, Could not bee scann’d nor measur’d halfe so well. Art’s length, Art’s depth, Art’s heighth can n’er bee found, Till thou art prostrate layd upon the ground. Learning noe farther than thy Life extends: With thee beganne all Art, with Thee it endes. (fol. 8r-v)

36. Controversy over The New Inn 1629–31

The play was acted in 1629 and first printed in 1631. (a) Jonson’s epilogue to the play. A second epilogue, intended for a court performance which never took place, is also printed in the 1631 edition; it defends the playwright against the hissing that it seems took place at the first performance because the chambermaid was named ‘Cis’ (the incident remains unexplained; the character is renamed ‘Pru’ in the printed version). Playes in themselves have neither hopes, nor feares, Their fate is only in their hearers eares: If you expect more then you had to night, The maker is sick, and sad. But doe him right, He meant to please you: for he sent things fit, In all the numbers, both of sense, and wit, If they ha’ not miscarried! if they have, All that his faint, and faltring tongue doth crave, Is, that you not impute it to his braine. That’s yet unhurt, although set round with paine, It cannot long hold out. All strength must yeeld. Yet judgement would the last be, i’the field, With a true Poet. He could have hal’d in The drunkards, and the noyses of the Inne, In his last Act; if he had thought it fit To vent you vapours, in the place of wit: But better ’twas, that they should sleepe, or spew, Then in the Scene to offend or him, or you. This he did thinke, and this doe you forgive: When ere the carcasse dies, this Art will live. And had he liv’d the care of King, and Queene, His Art in somthing more yet had beene seene; But Mayors, and Shriffes may yearely fill the stage: A Kings, or Poets birth doe aske an age. (Sig. [G7]v)

140 BEN JONSON

(b) Jonson, ‘Ode To himselfe’.

Written after the failure of The New Inn on stage in 1629. Printed from the version in John Benson’s edition of Jonson’s poems, Ben: Jonson’s Execration against Vulcan. With divers Epigrams by the same Author…(1640). John Earles, Thomas Randolph, and William Strode all made Latin verse translations of Jonson’s ‘Ode’: they are printed in H & S, x, 333–8. I. Come leave the loathed Stage, And the more loathsome Age, Where pride and impudence in faction knit, Usurpe the Chaire of wit: Inditing and arraigning every day, Something they call a Play. Let their fastidious vaine Commission of the braine, Runne on, and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn, They were not made for thee, lesse thou for them. II.

Say that pour’st ’hem wheat, And they would Akornes eat: Twere simple fury, still thy selfe to wast On such as have no taste: To offer them a surfeit of pure bread, Whose appetites are dead: No give them Graines their fill, Huskes, Draffe to drinke, and swill: If they love Lees, and leave the lusty Wine, Envy them not, their pallat’s with the Swine, III.

No doubt a mouldy Tale, Like Pericles, and Stale As the Shrives crusts, and nasty as his Fish, Scraps out of every Dish, Throwne forth and rak’d into the common Tub, May keep up the play Club. Broomes sweepings doe as well There, as his Masters meale: For who the relish of these guests will fit, Needs set them but the Almes-basket of wit. IV.

And much good do’t yee then, Brave Plush and Velvet men

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 141

Can feed on Orts, and safe in your scæne cloaths, Dare quit upon your Oathes The Stagers, and the stage writes too; your Peers, Of stuffing your large eares With rage of Commicke socks, Wrought upon twenty Blocks; Which if they’re torne, and foule, and patch’d enough, The Gamsters share your gilt, and you their stuffe. V.

Leave things so prostitute, And take th’ Alcaîke Lute; Or thine owne Horace, or Anacreons Lyre; Warme thee by Pindars fire: And though thy Nerves be shrunke, and blood be cold, Ere yeares have made thee old, Strike that disdainfull heat Throughout, to their defeat: As curious fooles, and envious of thy straine, May blushing sweare, no Palsi’s in thy braine. VI.

But when they heare thee sing The glories of thy King; His zeale to God, and his just awe of men, They may be blood-shaken, then Feele such a flesh-quake to possesse their powers, That no tun’d Harpe like ours, In sound of Peace or Warres, Shall truely hit the Starres: When they shall read the Acts of Charles his Reigne, And see his Chariot triumph ’bove his Waine. (Sig. fv–[f2]v) (c) The dedication from the 1631 edition of the play. (The title-page reads: ‘THE/ NEW INNE. /OR, /The Light Heart. / A COMOEDY. /As it was never acted, but most/negli-gently play’d, by some, /the Kings Servants. /And more squeamishly beheld, and censu-/red by others, the Kings subjects. /1629. /Now, at last, set at liberty to the Readers, His Maties/Servants, and Subjects, to be judg’d. /1631. /By the Author, B.Jonson.’ The motto is adapted from Horace, Epistles, 2.2.214–15: ‘I prefer to put myself in a reader’s hands, rather than brook the disdain of a scornful spectator.’) THE DEDICATION, TO THE READER.

142 BEN JONSON

IF thou bee such, I make thee my Patron, and dedicate the Piece to thee: If not so much, would I had beene at the charge of thy better litterature. How-so-ever, if thou canst but spell, and joyne my sense; there is more hope of thee, then of a hundred fastidious impertinents, who were there present the first day, yet never made piece of their prospect the right way. What did they come for, then? thou wil’t aske me. I will as punctually answer: To see, and to bee scene. To make a generall muster of themselves in their clothes of credit: and possesse the Stage, against the Play. To dislike all, but marke nothing. And by their confidence of rising between the Actes, in oblique lines, make affidavit to the whole house, of their not understanding one Scene. Arm’d, with this præjudice, as the Stagefurniture, or Arras-clothes, they were there, as Spectators, away. For the faces in the hangings, and they beheld alike. So I wish, they may doe ever. And doe trust my selfe, and my Booke, rather to thy rusticke candor, than all the pompe of their pride, and solemne ignorance, to boote. Fare thee well, and fall too. Read BEN JONSON. (Sig. (⋆)2r–(⋆)3r) (d) Owen Felltham, ‘An Answer to the Ode of Come leave the loathed Stage, &c.’, first printed in Parnassus Biceps, ed. Abraham Wright (1656); printed here from Felltham’s Lusoria: Or Occasional Pieces, printed with Resolves, ‘The eight Impression’ (1661). Felltham (? 1602–68) is best known for the Resolves, a series of moral essays. Come leave this saucy way Of baiting those that pay Dear for the sight of your declining wit: ’Tis known it is not fit, That a sale poet, just contempt once thrown, Should cry up thus his own. I wonder by what Dowre Or Patent you had power From all to rape1 a judgment. Let’t suffice, Had you been modest, y’ had been granted wise. ’Tis known you can do well, And that you do excel As a Translator; but when things require A genius and a fire, Not kindled heretofore by others’ pains; As oft y’have wanted brains And art to strike the White, As you have levelled right; Yet if men vouch not things Apocryphal, You bellow, rave, and spatter round your gall. Jug, Pierce, Peck, Fly, and all Your Jests so nominal, Are things so far beneath an able Brain, As they do throw a stain Through all th’ unlikely plot, and do displease As deep as Pericles,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 143

Where yet there is not laid Before a Chambermaid Discourse so weigh’d, as might have serv’d of old For Schools, when they of Love and Valour told. Why rage then? when the show Should Judgement be and Know ledge, that there are in Plush who scorn to drudge, For Stages yet can judge Not only Poets looser lines but wits, And all their Perquisits. A gift as rich as high Is noble Poesie: Yet though in sport it be for Kings a play, ’Tis next Mechanick when it works for pay. Alcæus lute had none, Nor loose Anacreon E’er taught so bold assuming of the Bayes, When they deserv’d no praise. To rail men into approbation Is new; ’tis yours2 alone, And, prospers not: For know Fame is as coy as you Can be disdainful; and who dares to prove A rape on her shall gather scorn, not love. Leave then this humour vain, And this more humorous strain, Where self-conceit and choler of the bloud Eclipse what else is good: Then if you please those raptures high to touch, Whereof you boast so much; And but forbear your Crown Till the world puts it on: No doubt from all you may amazement draw, Since braver Theme no Phæbus ever saw. (17–18) (e) Thomas Carew, ‘To Ben Johnson uppon occasion of his Ode to Himself’. Text from the autograph in the Domestic State Papers, Charles I clv, no. 79, 1629; the poem was printed in Carew’s Poems (1640), pp. 108–10.

Carew (? 1595–1640) was at Merton College, Oxford, then served Sir Dudley Carleton while the latter was ambassador in Venice and in the Netherlands, and Sir Edward Herbert while he was ambassador in Paris, returning to England in 1624; thereafter he held various posts at court. As well as a small body of verse, he wrote a masque, Coelum Britannicum (1634). He refers to actors rehearsing ‘great Johnsons verse’ in a commendatory poem to Davenant’s play The Just Italian (1630). His other recorded comment is a sarcastic aside to James Howell at a dinner where Jonson was present and praised himself: Howell says in a letter, published in 1647, that Carew ‘buz’d me in the ear, that though Ben had barreld up a great deale of knowledg, yet it seems he had not read the Ethiques, which among other precepts of

144 BEN JONSON

morality forbid self-commendation, declaring it to be an ill favourd solecism in good manners...’: (Epistolae Ho-Elianae (second edition, 1650), ii, 25). Falkland’s elegy in Jonsonus Virbius (No. 49(a), below) anticipates an elegy on Jonson from Carew, but none is known. ’Tis true (deere Ben:) thy just chastizing hand Hath fix’d uppon the sotted age, a brand To theyr swolne Pride, & empty scribling due, It can nor judge, nor write: & yet ’tis true Thy comique Muse from the exalted line Toucht by thy Alchymist, doth since decline From that her Zenith, & foretells a redd And blushing Evening, when she goes to bedd. Yet such, as shall outshine the glimmering light With which all starrs shall guilde the following night. Nor thinke it much, since all thy Eagletts maye Indure the sunny tryall, if we saye This hath the stronger wing, & that doth shine Trickt vpp in fayrer plumes, since All are thine. Whoe hath his flock of caqueling Geese compard To thy tun’d quire of Swans? or whoe hath dar’d To call thy byrths deformd? but if thou binde By Cittie customs, or by Gavellkinde In equall shares, thy love to all thy race, Wee maye distinguish of theyr sexe & place. Though one hand shape them, & though one brayne strike Soules into all, theye are not all alike. Why should the follies then, of this dull Age Drawe from thy penn such an immodest rage, As seemes to blast thy else immortall bayes, When thyne owne tongue proclaymes thy itch of prayse? Such thirst will argue drowth: no, lett be hurld Uppon thy workes, by the detracting world What malice can suggest, lett the rowte saye The running sandes, that ere thou make a playe Count the slowe minuts, might a Godwin frame, To swallowe when th’hast done thy shippwrackt name, Lett them the deere expence of oyle upbrayde, Suckt by thy watchfull lampe, which hath betrayde To theft the bloud of mayrtird Authors, spilt Into thy inke, whilst thou growst pale with guilt. Repine not at thy Tapers thriftie waste, That sleekes thy tearser Poems; nor is haste Prayse, but excuse: & if thou owercome A knottie writer, bring the bootie home. Nor thinke it theft, if the rich spoyles so torne From conquerd Authors, be as Trophies worne.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 145

Lett others glutt on the extorted prayse Of vulgar breath, trust thou to after dayes. Thy labour’d workes shall live, when Time devoures Th’ abortive ofspring of theyr hasty howers. Thou art not of theyr ranke, the quarrell lyes Within thyne owne virge; then lett this suffize The wiser world doth Greater Thee confess Then all men else, then Thyself only Less.’ (fol. 194r-v) (f) R.Goodwin, ‘Vindiciae Jonsoniae’. Printed from British Library Harleian MS 4955.

Included by Jonson in the ‘packet of mine own praises’ he sent to the Earl of Newcastle at the beginning of 1631. Since, what past Ages onlie had begun, and ventur’d at, Thou hast exactlie done; And that the Ancients, more precede not thee in Time, then thou dost them, in Pœsie: Staine not that Well-gaind Honour, with the crude, or the rash Censure, of a Multitude of Silken fooles; who cannot understand (for they were borne not to have wit, but Land) Thy sublim’d Soule: but daily doe preferre those, who almost as diligentlie erre, as thou dost write; more Comick rules mistake, then thou observ’dst of old, or new dost make; Revenge those wrongs with pittie; for wee see, t’is Ignorance in them, noe Crime in thee, that moulds their Judgments, who ere chanc’t to see, that vast prodigious Louvre-Gallerie, but at his Entrance (judging by his Eyes) Would thinke the roof inclin’de, the floore did rise! And at the end, each Equidistant Side, mett in one Point! though, there, they bee as wide as where he stood; soe they who now adaies Come to behold, not understand thy Plaies; With weake-ey’d Judgment, easelie may depresse thy loftie Muse, extoll the Lowlines, of trampled Poets; with Sinister Witt, Contract thy Dexterous vaine to answear it, and be deceav’d like him, or as those Eyes, Which, through grosse vapours, and thick ayre that flies close to the earth, the riseing Sun can veiw, and with deluded Sence doe judge it true, that, then, hee’s twice as Great, as when he hath ran, and is inthron’d, in their Meridian. Though at that time, he was more distant farre then the Whole Earth’s Semidiameter; Even so these Gallants, when they chance to heare

146 BEN JONSON

A new Witt peeping in their Hemisphere, Which they can apprehend, their clouded Braines, Will straight admire, and Magnifie his Straines, farre above thine; though all that he hath done, is but a Taper, to thy brighter Sun; Wound them with scorne! Who greives at such Fooles tongues, doth not revenge, but gratifie their wrongs. Who’s doom’d to erre, unto himself must bee An Heretique, if he judge right of Thee; Icterick-eyes, all different colours thinke, the same; What feaverish Palates drinke, tast’s ill, though nere so good; wee find by Sence, ev’en Contraries may have Coincidence. for, to a Smileing statue, let a hand adde some few Teares, though all the lines els stand, and Liniaments untouch’t, it will appeare, like Sorrowes figure, and the lively chere Drown’d into Sadnes: soe when these bold Men, blindlie misled, shall temerate thy Pen, Adding their Censures; thou maist seeme to bee, as different from Thy selfe, as they from Thee. Wer’t not the Sence I had of sacred writt, I should have call’d it Blasphemy ’gainst witt, And Sacriledge ’gainst Art; but when I see They little knowe themselves, & farr less Thee, Their dislike is thine Honour; Hee that’s mov’d, With such mens censures; graunteth it half prov’d that he is guiltie; Innocence no Lawes, Vertue feares no Detraction; t’is no cause, Yet Argument of worth, in that t’is true, Your Witt cannot suite them, nor their Braines you. Could such poore Intellectualls as theirs, But reach thy pitch, the Mind, that now admires, Would then contemne Thee; Hee’s esteem’d by none, that can be understood by every one; Fear’st then, thy Fame that warr’s ’gainst Tyme; Thy Pen, that triumph’s, can be foil’d by Out-side Men? Such Aromatique Trees? is’t such a Grace t’have pretious Barkes, when as the Timber’s base? Had they been halfe soe vers’d in witt; so bred in learned Authors, as they’re deepelie read in subtill Shop-Bookes, I confesse their Doome, that give’s thee a Laurell now, had giv’n thee a Tombe. But scorne to stand, feare not to fall, by Votes of such imbroydered-glittering-Silver Coates! The Capitol was sav’d, I doe confesse by watchfull Geese; but when Roomes thankfulnes, a silver goose erected, which there stood,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 147

did that discover foes, or doe Roome good? Nor can these Gilt-men, Thee. Thy dareing Pen, that may contend with Fate, can that feare men? When Roome, that quel’d the world, to thee had beene a debtor for her Safetie (had she scene, or beene so blest, as to have heard one lyne, Which thy Pen wrote of bloody Cataline) More, then to that vaine Consulls glorieing Style, Whose every period seemes a German myle; Whose fluent tongue, more lively, at that time, exprest his owne vaine-glorie, then their Crime; for words and Actions, might be easely knowne, the thought’s were only Cataline’s, and thine owne. And thou didst write, what he durst think, or dare: Could wee now Question Cataline, and compare Him with thy writeings, wee should sweare, almost, thy Muse had beene Confessor, to his Ghost; And his soules Characters in his Front had read, Which threatned death, when he himself was dead. Had shee read thy Sejanus life, and fate; World’s second Head! that Tympany of State! She had a wonder scene, farr greater, then, then was himselfe! him, equall’d by thy Pen! Nay more a miracle; for on thy Stage, Cæsar’s out done in Crafte, Rome in her rage. The other workes, rais’d by thy skillfull hand, pittying the Worlds old wonders, they shall stand As Monuments of thee, more firme, amids all envies blasts, then Ægypts Pyramids Those burthens of the Earth, ’gainst laboring stormes; Thus, then secur’d above the reach of Harmes, Low Soules can meditate; use not that pen, that could affright the world, ’gainst such poore Men. Hee is more foole, then Tyrant, that would kill, His Enemie at once: too great an Ill It is to them, they cannot hurt thee: bee then wise to them as they are fooles to Thee. For if those men that built th’Ephesian Pile, did feed the toil’d out Asses all the while, on publique charge, whose younger strength did bring, Materialls to that Structure (as a thinge As great in Charity, for them to yeild food to those beasts, as Piety to builde Their Goddesse such a Temple) shal’t be thought that the ridiculous Asses, which once brought, t, Thee such Materials, as have made thy Stage, to be the Greatest wonder of our Age, should not at last (tyr’d-out in Follies) gett,

148 BEN JONSON

Licence to banquet, their Decrepit Witt, on Offall Poets? on the Common Store, and Scraps of witt? Nay greive there are no more, to please their Tasts, for when Fooles plentie bee, Wise men are Miracles. When Rome did see, at Cæsar’s Triumph, all the figures there, of rich Materials, Gold and Silver were: And in the Triumph, next to his, not one, but carv’d in Wood, in Ivory, or Stone; They did conceive, the Last which they had seen, serv’d as a case to keepe great Cæsars in: Soe after thy rare peeces, when wee heare such blockish Poems, doe they not appeare like dark-foiles, closely sett? which cannot shine, Yet give what in themselves they want, to thine, Lustre and life; as they were only showne, to lock thy Memory up in, not their owne; and that soe safelie too; that Fate from Thee Cannot take life; it may Mortalitie: Other Oblivion, then, thou ne’re shalt find, then that, which, with Thee, must put out Mankind. (fols 186r–187v) (g) The anonymous ‘The Cuntrys Censure on Ben Johnsons New Inn’, in Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 38. (The punctuation has been lightened.) The poet refers to ‘Pru’ (l.22), indicating that it was written after the publication of the play in 1631. Listen (decaying Ben) and Counsell heare, wittes have their date and strength of braines may weare; Age, steept In sacke, hath quencht thy Enthean fier, wee pittye now, whom once wee did Admire. Surrender then thy right to th’stage; forbeare to dare to wright what others Loath to heare, and justlye, since thy Crazye Muse doth now To quitte her Spartane province3 fayntly knowe. Swear not by God tis good, for yf you doe, The world will taxe your zeale, and Judgment too. for In a Poett, yf that’s last regarded, New Inn’s discretion hath the[e] quite discarded; from Aganippes pale and plact the[e] Amonge Not the giddye headed, but the Unbrowed Thronge. Rayle not att the Actors; doe not them Abuse, Action to dullness Cannott Life Infuse; for Velvett, Scarlett, Plush, doe tell you true, t’was not their Cloaths, but thay did blush for you to see; and was not that, Just cause of rage? Weaknes and Impudence possesst the stage, Injurde the strength of Witt, now cloyde and dry.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 149

Goodstocke, Prue, Frampole, Huffell, Burst, Typ, Fly, And their Comrades, whose Language but to heare Might stricke A surfett Into A gentle eare. But lett me tell thee this, Ben, by the way, Thy Argument’s as tedious as thy play; Thou saist noe Palsye doth thy Brayne pan vex, I pray the[e] tell me what? an Apoplex? Thy Pegasus can stir, yett thy best Care Makes her but shuffle lyke the parson[’s] mare4 who from his owne side witt sayes thus by mee: hee hath bequeath’d his bellye unto thee To holde that little Learning, which is fled Into thy Gutts from out thy Emptye head. Yett thou art Confident, & darst still sweare, The fault’s not In thy Brain, but In their eare. What dismale fate is this, thus on thee seaseth? Thy worth doth fayle; thy Arrogance Increaseth; Pride and presumption hath dethronde thy witt, And sett upp Philautie In place of ytt, Thy Innbred Darling, whose strong selfe Conceipt, forstailing prayse, did thy Just prayse defeate. Worth being selfe praisd, doth fall; hee is the best Poett Can justly merritt Prayse, & yett scarce knowe ytt. But tis New Inn’s disaster, not to knowe What or thy selfe, or others can Allow. Wee wronge the[e] nott, for take thy enraged Appeale, twill rather fester thy Mad wound then heale. For knowe, what5 Justly doth dispise, doth prove A greater scandall to our eyes; And sure that sensure must Impartiall bee whear readers and spectators both agree: Yett, yff pure need Inforce thee to this shame, we proner are to Advise thee, then to blame. Since Witts doe fayle, thou wert best, pore Crackt braine elfe, To turne mine host, and keep new Inn thy selfe: But Change thy signe yff thou’lt bee ruld by me, No more Light Hart, but Light Brayne lett ytt bee. Thy Hostler Peck Abused thus the Jade of this fatt-bellied Parson, who thes made. (79–80) NOTES 1 So in Parnassus Biceps; the Lusoria text reads, ‘to rap’t’. 2 So in Parnassus Biceps; the Lusoria text reads, ‘Is new in yours’. 3 Michael Hattaway (ed.), The New Inn (Manchester 1984), p. 226n, points out that this is a reference to Richard Brome: spartum is Latin for broom, thus the ‘Spartan province’ is the stage won by Jonson’s pupil and rival.

150 BEN JONSON

4 There is a discussion in The New Inn on how Peck the ostler is to cozen parsons in looking after their horses; ‘A little greasing i’ the teeth’ keeps a parson’s horse ‘in a sober shuffle’, suggests Fly (3.1.145–6). The passage is alluded to again in the final couplet of the present poem. 5 A word has apparently been left out between ‘what’ and ‘Justly’.

37. Falkland on Jonson as the dispenser of fame 1631 or earlier

‘Epistle To his Noble Father, Mr Jonson’, from Harleian MS 4955, in the British Library. Sent by Jonson to the Earl of Newcastle in 1631 with an ‘Epistle’ by Falkland on the anniversary of Sir Henry Morison’s death—in which Jonson is called ‘Poetparamont’ and ‘Our Metropolitane in Poetry’ —and verses by Oldisworth (No. 35, above) and Goodwin (No. 36(f)). The poem conveys spiritedly Falkland’s admiration for Jonson, and pictures the poet as a living monument, already disembodied into abstract qualities. Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland (? 1610–43) was the centre of an intellectual circle at his house at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, joined the Royalist party, became Secretary of State in 1642 and fell at the Battle of Newbury in September 1643. He was one of Jonson’s patrons: Clarendon says in the Life that Falkland ‘seemed to have his estate in trust, for all worthy persons, who stood in want of supplies and encouragement, as Ben Johnson, and many others of that time, whose fortunes required, and whose spirits made them superior to, ordinary obligations…’ (G.Huehns (ed.), Clarendon: Selections from ‘The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars’ and ‘The Life by Himself’ (1955), p. 64). The Fox the Lions sight extreamelie fear’d haveing his force, and feircenes onelie heard; And, the first time, was Ague-struck to see his dangerous Pawes, and King-like Majestie; The second meeting-time, approaching nere, A warmer courage thaw’d away his feare: The third, you would have thought, he had his Twin his Den-fellowe, or long acquaintance bin. T’was onlie custome; for the Fox had skill to know the Lion, was a Lion, still. Such is my case: for when I first did see the Patent, of your Imortalitie, Your workes, by whose full Style, Strong Witt, I knew so long as English liv’d, so long would you! I should have quak’d, if I had thought to write to Phœbus, his owne wonder, Mans Delight!

152 BEN JONSON

That which augments my Courage, with such Store, is not I like you lesse; But know you more. I thought you proud, for I did surely knowe, had I Ben: Jonson, bene, I had beene soe. And thought it was forgiveable, nay fitt for him, whose Muse had such wit-wonders, writt. Now I recant; And doubt, whether your Store of Ingenuity, or Ingenie, be more! I wish your Wealth were equall to them both, You have deserv’d it: yet I should be loth that want, should a Quotidian trouble bee to such a Zeno, in Phylosophie; Shame’s wants worst companie; and t’is no shame to want in Mettall, and be rich in fame. In Hell, it might Sejanus spirits raise that your pen spoke of him, although Dispraise. Hee sure would choose a mention from your Quill, rather, then t’have bene fix’t a Favorite still. Hee may allow Tiberius thanks, not hate; his worser, hath begot his better Fate. Hee had not cause to joy, so in that hower he second was in place; but first, in power, of all the world! Then can there be a Blisse to be compar’d, nay to come neare to his? Whom this your Quill (not differing from your hart) hath often mencioned, on the better part? Shall he that all els cures, himself not live? can you want that, you can to others give? None gives but what hee hath; that happines You deale abroad, still you your-self possesse: Though given to others, it becomes their Due: it, echo-like, reverberates to yow! That ⋆Earle of Warwick, which (past Poetrie) Æqual’d the acts of fabulous Sir Guy, With whom, still, like his Page, Destruction came: Whose Armes got fewer Conquest’s then his Name: Whom, to his end, scare infinite od’s could bring; chose rather to create, then be a King. Let his Example then, exclude all woe: that Man’s most happie, that makes others soe. Ipse ego qui nullos me affirmo scribere versus Invenior Parthis mendacior, et prius orto Sole, vigil calamum, et chartas, et scrinia posco.1 Your Sonne and servant. Lucius Cary. (fol. 184r-v)

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 153

NOTES [Marginal note in MS] In H[enry]: the 6ths time. ⋆ 1 ‘I myself, who declare that I write no verses, prove to be more of a liar than the Parthians: before sunrise I wake, and call for pen, paper, and writing-case’: Horace, Epistles, 2.1.111– 13.

154

38. Leonard Digges, Shakespeare’s plays more popular than Jonson’s (?)1632

‘Upon Master WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the Deceased Authour, and his POEMS’, prefixed to the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems. Digges wrote a shorter tribute to Shakespeare for the 1623 Folio (‘To the Memorie of the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare’), which like the present poem refers to Shakespeare’s Romans parleying at half-sword. As John Freehafer points out in ‘Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry’, Shakespeare Quarterly (1970), xxi, 63–75, Digges’s reference here to ‘new Fortunes younger brethren’ suggests a date of composition for the poem of 1630–4, the only period when there was a boys’ company (the King’s Revels) acting at the Fortune theatre; moreover, the fact that Digges’s verses are apparently meant for a printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays suggests that they were a rewriting of the 1623 poem for the Second Folio of 1632 (the suggestion first made in David Frost, ‘Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century’, Shakespeare Quarterly (1965), xvi, 84n). It would seem that Digges’s disparaging references to Jonson’s work in the new sections made it imposible to include them in a volume which gave Jonson’s lines on Shakespeare pride of place among the prefatory verses. Indeed, as Freehafer point out, Digges’s poem may well be seen as a vigorous reply to Jonson’s suggestions in his ‘Ode’ that poets were made as well as born, that Shakespeare’s classical learning was scanty and that his work owed something to laborious Art as well as to Nature. Digges (1588–1635) graduated BA at Oxford in 1606 and in 1626 was granted an MA and permitted to live in University College, where he died. According to Anthony à Wood he had spent some years in foreign universities; he published The Rape of Proserpine, a translation from Claudian, in 1617, and Gerardo, a translation from the Spanish of Cespedes, in 1622. Poets are borne not made, when I would prove This truth, the glad rememberance I must love Of never dying Shakespeare, who alone, Is argument enough to make that one. First, that he was a Poet none would doubt, That heard th’applause of what he sees set out Imprinted; where thou hast (I will not say)

156 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Reader his Workes (for to contrive a Play: To him twas none) the patterne of all wit, Art without Art unparaleld as yet. Next Nature onely helpt him, for looke thorow This whole Booke, thou shall find he doth not borrow, One phrase from Greekes, nor Latines imitate, Nor once from vulgar Languages Translate, Nor Plagiari-like from others gleane, Nor begges he from each witty friend a Scene To peece his Acts with, all that he doth write, Is pure his owne, plot, language exquisite, But oh! what praise more powerfull can we give The dead, then that by him the Kings men live, His Players, which should they but have shar’d the Fate, All else expir’d within the short Termes date; How could the Globe have prospered, since through want Of change, the Plaies and Poems had growne scant. But happy Verse thou shall be sung and heard, When hungry quills shall be such honour bard. Then vanish upstart Writers to each Stage, You needy Poetasters of this Age, Where Shakespeare liv’d or spake, Vermine forbeare, Least with your froth you spot them, come not neere; But if you needs must write, if poverty So pinch, that otherwise you starve and die, On Gods name may the Bull and Cockpit have Your lame blancke Verse, to keepe you from the grave: Or let new Fortunes younger brethren see, What they can picke from your leane industry. I doe not wonder when you offer at Blacke-Friers, that you suffer: tis the fate Of richer veines, prime judgements that have far’d The worse, with this deceased man compar’d. So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare, And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were, Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience, Were ravish’d, with what wonder they went thence, When some new day they would not brooke a line, Of tedious (though well laboured) Catilines; Sejanus too was irkesome, they priz’de more Honest lago, or the jealous Moore. And though the Fox and subtill Alchimist, Long intermitted could not quite be mist, Though these have sham’d all the Ancients, and might raise, Their Authours merit with a crowne of Bayes. Yet these sometimes, even at a friends desire Acted, have scarce defrai’d the Seacoale fire And doore-keepers: when let but Falstaffe come,

BEN JONSON 157

Hall, Poines, the rest you scarce shall have a roome All is so pester’d: let but Beatrice And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice The Cockpit Galleries, Boxes, all are full To heare Malvoglio that crosse garter’d Gull. Briefe, there is nothing in his wit fraught Booke, Whose sound we would not heare, on whose worth looke Like old coynd gold, whose lines in every page, Shall passe true currant to succeeding age. But why doe I dead Shakespeares praise recite, Some second Shakespeare must of Shakespeare write; For me tis needlesse, since an host of men, Will pay to clap his praise, to free my Pen. (Sig. ⋆3r–[⋆4]r)

158

39. Thomas Randolph on the power of Jonson’s verses 1632 or later

From ‘An Eglogue to Mr Johnson’, in Randolph’s Poems with the Muses lookingGlasse: and Amyntas (1638). Date suggested in G.Thorn-Drury (ed.), The Poems of Thomas Randolph (1929), p. 206. Randolph (1605–35) was among the most enthusiastic of Jonson’s ‘Sons’, but, of the poems praising Jonson, the extract below offers the most specific comments on his work. ‘A Letter to Ben Johnson’, in Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet, e. 97, pp. 98–9, protests honour and love to Jonson, calling him ‘our God of Poets’ and acknowledging that writing verses to him is adding ‘Dropps to the sea’; there is a reference to ‘The divine Ben, the immortall Johnson’ and to ‘his vulpone, the lerned fox’ in the manuscript version of Aristippus of c. 1627 (British Library Sloane MS. 2531, fol. 133r: omitted in the printed version, 1630, Sig. C1v); there is the reverent ‘A gratulatory to Mr Ben. Johnson for his adopting of him to be his Son’ from 1628 or after; and there is ‘An answer to Mr Ben Johnson’s Ode to perswade him not to leave the stage’ from the New Inn controversy of 1629, urging the enraged poet to ignore his enemies and go on writing for the stage as well as in the vein of Horace and Pindar and ‘have this envious, ignorant Age to know, /Thou that can sing so high, canst reach as low’ (Poems (1638), p. 73). Later in the ‘Eglogue’ Damon refers to Tityrus’s (Jonson’s) uneven success with audiences: ‘the Vulgar I contemn; Thy pipe not alwaies Tytirus wins with them’ (p. 99) [Damon (i.e. Randolph himself) pauses in telling Tityrus (Jonson) why he has broken his reed and forsworn music to praise Tityrus’s piping:] Thine which the floods have stopt their course to hear; To which the spotted Linx hath lent an eare. Which while the severall Ecchoes would repeat, The Musick has been sweet, the Art so great That Pan himself amaz’d at thy deep aires, Sent thee of his own bowl to drown thy cares. Of all the Gods Pan doth the Pipe respect, The rest unlearned pleasures more affect. Pan can distinguish what thy Raptures be From Bavius loose lascivious Minstralsie,

160 BEN JONSON

Or Mævius windy Bagpipe, Mævius, he Whose wit is but a Tavern Tympanie. If ever flock of my own doe feed, My fattest Lambs shall on his Altar bleed. (ll. 33–46; p. 98)

40. Ben Jonson, The Magnetic Lay 1632

From the Induction and Chorus of the play. It was performed in 1632, and first published in volume ii of the 1640 folio, as The Magnetick Lady: Or, Humors Reconcild. The speakers in the Induction and Chorus are Mr. Probee and Mr. Damplay, two ‘Gentlemen’, and a boy ‘of the house’, i.e. of the theatre. (a) From the Induction. Dam. But, why Humors reconcil’d? I would fain know? Boy…. The Author, beginning his studies of this kind, with every man in his Humour; and after, every man out of his Humour; and since, continuing in all his Playes, especially those of the Comick thred, whereof the New-Inne was the last, some recent humours still, or manners of men, that went along with the times, finding himselfe now neare the close, or shutting up of his Circle, hath phant’sied to himselfe, in Idæa, this Magnetick Mistris. A Lady a brave bountifull House-keeper, and a vertuous Widow: who having a young Neice, ripe for a man and marriageable, hee makes that his Center attractive, to draw thither a diversity of Guests, all persons of different humours to make up his Perimiter. And this hee hath call’d Humors reconcil’d. Pro. A bold undertaking! and farre greater, then the reconciliation of both Churches, the quarrell betweene humours having beene much the ancienter, and, in my poore opinion, the root of all Schisme, and Faction, both in Church and Common-wealth. Boy. Such is the opinion of many wise men, that meet at this shop still; but how hee will speed in it, wee cannot tell, and hee himselfe (it seems) lesse cares. For hee will not be intreated by us, to give it a Prologue. He has lost too much that way already, hee sayes. Hee will not woo the gentile ignorance so much. But carelesse of all vulgar censure, as not depending on common approbation, hee is confident it shall super-please judicious Spectators, and to them he leaves it to worke, with the rest by example, or otherwise. Dam. Hee may be deceived in that, Boy: Few follow examples now, especially, if they be good. (7) (b) From the Chorus between Acts I and II. Boy…. I would we had Hokospokos for ’hem, then; your People, or Travitanto Tudesko. Dam. Who’s that, Boy?

162 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Boy. Another Juggler, with a long name. Or that your expectors would be gone hence, now, at the first Act; or expect no more hereafter, then they understand. Dam. Why so my peremptory Jack? Boy. My name is John, indeed—Because, who expect what is impossible, or beyond nature, defraud themselves. Pro. Nay, there the Boy said well: They doe defraud themselves indeed. Boy. And therefore, Mr. Damplay, unlesse like a solemne Justice of wit, you will damne our Play, unheard, or unexamin’d; I shall intreat your Mrs. Madam Expectation, if shee be among these Ladies, to have patience, but a pissing while: give our Springs leave to open a little, by degrees: A Source of ridiculous matter may breake forth anon, that shall steepe their temples, and bathe their braines in laughter, to the fomenting of Stupiditie it selfe, and the awaking any velvet Lethargy in the House. Pro. Why doe you maintaine your Poets quarrell so with velvet, and good clothes, Boy? wee have scene him in indifferent good clothes, ere now. Boy. And may doe in better, if it please the King (his Master) to say Amen to it, and allow it, to whom hee acknowledgeth all. But his clothes shall never be the best thing about him, though; hee will have somewhat beside, either of humane letters, or severe honesty, shall speak him a man though he went naked. Pro. Hee is beholden to you, if you can make this good, Boy. Boy. Himselfe hath done that, already, against Envy. (19) (c) From the Chorus between Acts III and IV. Dam. This was a pittifull poore shift o’ your Poet, Boy, to make his prime woman with child, and fall in labour, just to compose a quarrell. Boy. With whose borrowed eares, have you heard, Sir, all this while, that you can mistake the current of our Scene so? The streame of the Argument, threatned her being with child from the very beginning, for it presented her in the first of the second Act, with some apparent note of infirmity, or defect: from knowledge of which, the Auditory were rightly to bee suspended by the Author, till the quarrell, which was but the accidentall cause, hastned on the discovery of it, in occasioning her affright; which made her fall into her throwes presently, and within that compasse of time allow’d to the Comedy, wherein the Poet exprest his prime Artifice, rather then any errour, that the detection of her being with child, should determine the quarrell, which had produc’d it. Pro. The Boy is too hard for you. Brother Damplay, best marke the Play, and let him alone. (42) (d) The Chorus between Acts IV and V. Dam. Troth, I am one of those that labour with the same longing, for [the intrigue] is almost pucker’d, and pull’d into that knot, by your Poet, which I cannot easily, with all the strength of my imagination, untie. Boy. Like enough, nor is it in your office to be troubled or perplexed with it, but to sit still, and expect. The more your imagination busies it selfe, the more it is intangled, especially if (as I told, in the beginning) you happen on the wrong end.

BEN JONSON 163

Pro. He hath said sufficient, Brother Damplay; our parts that are the Spectators, or should heare a Comedy, are to await the processe, and events of things, as the Poet presents them, not as wee would corruptly fashion them. Wee come here to behold Playes, and censure them, as they are made, and fitted for us; not to beslave our owne thoughts, with censorious spitle tempering the Poets clay, as wee were to mould every Scene anew: That were a meere Plastick, or Potters ambition, most unbecomming the name of a Gentleman. No, let us marke, and not lose the busines on foot, by talking. Follow the right thred, or find it. Dam. Why, here his Play might have ended, if hee would h’ let it; and have spar’d us the vexation of a fift Act yet to come, which every one here knowes the issue of already, or may in part conjecture. Boy. That conjecture is a kind of Figure-flinging, or throwing the Dice, for a meaning was never in the Poete purpose perhaps. Stay, and see his last Act, his Catastrophe, how hee will perplexe that, or spring some fresh cheat, to entertaine the Spectators, with a convenient delight, till some unexpected, and new encounter breake out to rectifie all, and make good the Conclusion. Pro. Which, ending here, would have showne dull, flat, and unpointed; without any shape, or sharpenesse, Brother Damplay. Dam. Well, let us expect then: And wit be with us, o’ the Poets part. (52)

164

41. Alexander Gill, attack on The Magnetic Lady 1633

‘Uppon Ben Jonsons Magnettick Ladye’, in Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 38, from which it is printed here. Gill (1597–1642) was under-usher and later high-master of St Paul’s School, where he taught Milton. Jonson responded to his attack in U.V., 39. Parturient Montes Nascitur1 Is this your Loadestone Ben that must Attract Applause and Laughter att each Scæne and Acte Is this the Childe of your Bedridden witt An[d] none but the Black-friers foster ytt Iff to the Fortune you had sent your Ladye Mongest Prentizes, and Apell wyfes, ytt may bee Your Rosie Foole might have some sporte have gott With his strang habitt, and Indiffinett Nott But when As silkes and plush, and all the witts Are Calde to see, and Censure as befitts And yff your Follye take not, they perchance Must feare them selfes stilde Gentle Ignorance Foh how ytt stinckes; what generall offence Gives thy Prophanes, and grosse Impudence O, how thy frind, Natt Butter2 gan to Melte When as the poorenes of thy plott he smelte And Inigo with laughter ther grewe fatt That thear was Nothing worth the Laughing att And yett thou Crazye art Confidente Belchinge out full mouthd oathes with foulle Intent Calling us Fooles and Rogues unlettered men Poor Narrow soules that Cannott Judge of Ben: Yett which is wors after three shamfull foyles The Printers must bee putt to further toyles3 Where as Indeed to (Vindicate thy fame) Th’hadst better give thy Pamphelett to the flame O what a strange Prodigiows yeare twill bee Yff this thy playe Come forth In thirtye three

166 BEN JONSON

Lett Doomse Day rather Come on New yeares Eve And yff thy Paper plague the worlde bereave Which Plague I feare worse then A sergeants bitt Worse then the Infection or an Ague Fitt Worse then Astronomers Devynning Lipps Worse then three sunns, A Comett or Eclipps Or yff thy Learned brother Allestree (Whose Homer unto the[e] for Poetrye) Should tell of Raigne uppon Saint Swithins day And that should wash our harvest Clean away As for the Press, yf thy Playe must Come toote Let Thomas Purffoot or John Trundell doo’te In such Dull Charrectors as for releiffs of fines and wrackes wee find in Beggine briefes But In Capp paper lett ytt printed bee Indeed Browne paper Is to good for thee And lett ytt bee so Apocriphall As nott to dare to venture on A stall Except ytt bee of Druggers Grocers Cookes Victuallers Tobackoe men and suchlike Rookes From Bucklers Burye lett ytt not be barde But thincke nott of Ducke lane or Paules Churchyarde Butt to advyse the[e] Ben, In this strickt Age A Brickehill’s fitter for the[e] then A stage Thou better knowes a groundsell how to Laye Then lay the plott or groundworke of A playe And better canst derecte to Capp a Chimney Then to Converse with Clio, or Polihimny fall then to worke, In thy old Age agen Take upp your Trugg and Trowell gentle Ben Lett playes Alone, and yff thou needs wilte wright and thrust thy feeble Muse Into the Light Lett Lowine4 Cease, and Taylore feare to Touch The Loathed stage; for thou hast made ytt such. (15) NOTES 1 ‘The mountains laboured, [a ridiculous mouse] was born’: Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 139. 2 The stationer Nathaniel Butter, who is glanced at in the play (3.7.13). 3 H & S, ix, 253 suggest that the ‘three shamfull foyles’ were three unsuccessful performances of the play. Gill’s next lines indicate that ‘Jonson was expected to follow the precedent of The New Inn and to print the play at once when it failed upon the stage’ (H & S, xi, 348). 4 John Lowin and Joseph Taylor were two leading actors in the King’s Men.

42. James Howell, letters to Jonson 1632–5

Howell (? 1594–1666) worked for a glassware makers’ company in London after leaving Oxford in 1613, spending some years on the Continent collecting materials and workmen on its behalf. From 1622 he turned to diplomacy and to writing to earn his living; in 1661 he was made historiographer royal. The first volume of the Epistolae Ho-Elianae. Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren…was published in 1645, a second in 1647, an edition in three volumes in 1650, and in four volumes in 1655. Verona M.Hirst in ‘The authenticity of James Howell’s familiar letters’, Modern Language Review (1959), liv, 558–61, concludes that Howell drew on his collection of copies of already written letters to make up a heavily edited version for publication. (The dates of the letters in Howell’s first volume were only added in the second edition of 1650.) A letter to Jonson, not printed here, retails a macabre French tale which Howell suggests may be ‘choice and rich stuff for you to put upon your Loom’ (dated 3 May 1635; 1650 edition, i, 207–8). Howell has an elegy to Jonson in Jonsonus Virbius, also printed (with a letter to Dr Duppa explaining that the poem was solicited by Sir Thomas Hawkins) in the Epistolae (i, 217–18). (a) ‘To my Father Mr Ben: Johnson’, Section 5, no. xvii; first printed in 1645, text here from the second edition of 1650. Dated 1629, but mentions The Magnetic Lady so part of it at least must date from 1632 or later. Howell must have found the Welsh dictionary mentioned in the letter below, as a copy survives with Jonson’s inscription recording the gift (H & S, i, 258–9) and Howell prints the letter that, accompained it (i, 163–4). Father Ben, Nullum fit magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiæ, thers no great wit without som mixture of madnes, so saith the Philosopher, nor was he a fool who answered, nec parvum, sine mixtura stultitia, nor small wit without some allay of foolishness. Touching the first it is verified in you, for I find that you have bin oftentimes mad, you were mad when you writ your Fox, and madder when you writ your Alchymist, you were mad when you writ Catilin, and stark mad when you writ Sejanus; but when you writ your Epigrammes, and the Magnetic Lady you were not so mad; Insomuch as I perceive that ther be degrees of madnes in you; Excuse me that I am so free with you. The madness I mean is that divine fury, that heating and heightning Spirit which Ovid speaks of, Est Deus in nobis agitante calescimus illo,1 that true enthusiasm which transports, and elevates the souls of Poets, above the middle

168 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Region of vulgar conceptions, and makes them soar up to Heaven to touch the starrs with their laurelld heads, to walk in the Zodiac with Apollo himself, and command Mercury upon their errand. I cannot yet light upon Doctor Davies his Welsh Grammer, before Christmas I am promised one; So desiring you to look better hereafter to your charcole fire and chimney, which I am glad to be one that preserv’d from burning, this being the second time that Vulcan hath threatened you, it may be because you have spoken ill of his wife and bin too busy with his hornes; I rest Westminster, 27 June, 1629 Your Son, and contiguous Neighbour, J.H. (i, 154) (b) ‘To Mr. B.J.’, no. 2 in volume ii of the Epistolae, first printed in 1647. Text from the second edition of 1650. In an earlier letter Howell had warned Jonson that he had been censured at court for his attack on Jones (dated 3 May 1635; 1650 edition, i, 208). F[ather]. B[en]. The fangs of a Bear, and the Tusks of a wild Bore, do not bite worse, and make deeper gashes than a Goose-quill somtimes, no not the Badger himself, who is said to be so tenacious of his bite, that he will not give over his hold, till he feels his teeth meet, and the bone crack: your quill hath prov’d so to Mr. In. Jones but the pen wherwith you have so gash’d him, it seems was made rather of a Porcupine, than a Goose quill, it is so keen and firm: You know Anser, Apis, Vitulus, populos & Regna gubernant; The Goose, the Bee, and the Calf (meaning Wax, Parchment, and the Pen) rule the world, but of the three, the Pen is most predominant; I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannize in that manner, as you have don lately; some give out ther was a hair in’t, or that your ink was too thick with Gall, els it could not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a Royall Architect, for reputation, you know is like a fair structure long time a rearing, but quickly ruin’d: If your spirit will not let you retract, yet you shall do well to repress any more copies of the Satyr, for to deal plainly with you, you have lost som ground at Court by it, and as I hear from a good hand, the King who hath so great a judgment in Poetry (as in all other things els) is not well pleased therwith. Dispense with this freedom of Westmin. 3 July, 1635 Your respectfull S. and Servitor, J.H. (ii, 2–3) NOTE 1 ‘There is a god within us. It is when he stirs us that our bosom warms’: Ovid, Fasti, 6.5.

43. Sir John Suckling, caricature of Jonson 1637 or earlier

From the unfinished tragedy The Sad One, first published in 1659; this text from L.A.Beaurline (ed.), The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays (Oxford 1971). ‘A Song to a Lute’ in Act IV, Scene iv, of The Sad One is a parody of ‘Have you seen but a bright lily grow’ from The Devil is an Ass; and the character Signior Multecarni, a poet preparing a masque for the court in the play, is evidently a caricature of Jonson. Ironically, the publisher of the 1659 edition, Humphrey Moseley, cites the publication of The Sad Shepherd, by ‘an Author who confessedly is reputed the Glory of the English Stage’, as a precedent for publishing Suckling’s fragment: Jonson’s pastoral, though it ‘wants two entire Acts, was nevertheless judg’d a Piece of too much worth to be laid aside, by the Learned and Honorable Sir Kenelme Digby, who published that Volume’; the example of the publication of Jonson’s fragment The Fall of Mortimer is also quoted (p. 3). Sir John Suckling (1609–?41) left Cambridge without taking a degree, and travelled frequently on the Continent as a soldier, student, and diplomat between 1629 and 1632. After his return to England he established himself as a courtier (he had purchased his knighthood in 1630) and as a poet, and was well-known for his gambling exploits. In 1639 he raised a troop for service in the ignominious First Bishops’ War, and in 1641 he fled to France after the revelation of the Army Plot against Parliament, in which he was involved. Nicholas Rowe’s story of Suckling’s defence of Shakespeare against Jonson in a conversation including Jonson himself, Sir William Davenant, Endymion Porter, and John Hales of Eton (see No. 105, below), suggests that he was a partisan against Jonson in the controversy over the latter’s merits as against Shakespeare’s. (There are versions of the story in Dryden’s Essay (see No. 67, below), and in Charles Gildon, Miscellaneous Letters and Essays (1694), pp. 85–6—though in Gildon’s version, Jonson is not mentioned and Suckling appears as one of the ‘Judges’ of the issue rather than as partisan for Shakespeare.) In ‘Sir, /Whether these lines do find you out’, a poem in Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea (1646), the poet invites Hales to come to London where (among other pleasures) a hackney-coach will convey him to ‘The sweat of learned Johnson’s brain, /And gentle Shakespear’s easier strain…’ (p. 35). (a) Act IV, Scene v.

170 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Enter Signior MULTECARNI the Poet, and two of the Actors. MULTECARNI. Well, if there be no remedy, one must act two parts; Rosselio shall be the Fool and the Lord, and Tisso the Citizen and the Cuckold. 1. ACTOR. That cannot be, Signior, you know, one still comes in, when the other goes out. MULTECARNI. By Jove ’tis true; let me see, we’ll contrive it, the Lord and the Usurer, the Citizen and the Polititian; and sure they never are together. But who shall act the Honest Lawyer? ’Tis a hard part, that. 2. ACTOR. And a tedious one, it’s admired you would put it in, Squire; and ’tis against your own rules, to represent any thing on the Stage, that cannot be. MULTECARNI. Why, dost think ’tis impossible for a Lawyer to be honest? 1. ACTOR. As ’tis for a Lord Treasurer to be poor, or for a King not to be cozened. There’s little Robin, in debt within these three years, grown fat and full by the trade: and then there’s Borachio, an unknown man, got it all by speaking loud and bawling: believe it, Signior, they have no more conscience then an Inn-keeper. — MULTECARNI. I grant you all this; An old Cook, and a good, will please all palates: There’s that for the young Tapers of the Law; then there’s a bawdy Jest or two extraordinary for the Ladies; and when it comes to be acted in private, I’ll have a jerk at the State for the Country-Gentlemen: If it does not take, my masters, it lies not upon me, I have provided well; and if the stomack of the times be naught, the fault’s not in the meat or the Cook. Come, let’s find out Lepido and dine at the Mermaid— Come let us have one Rowse, my Joves, in Aristippus, we shall conceive the better afterwards. ACTORS. Agreed, Agreed— Come, come away, to the Tavern I say, For now at home is Washing-day: Leave your prittle-prattle, let’s have a Pottle, We are not so wise as Aristotle. Exeunt singing. (26–7) (b) Act V, Scene i.

Enter LEPIDO, DROLLIO. DROLLIO. A rare Masque, no doubt, who contriv’d it? LEPIDO. Marry he that says ’tis good, howsoere he has made it, Signior Multecarni. DROLLIO. Who, the Poet Laureat? LEPIDO. The same. DROLLIO. Oh then ’twere blasphemy to speak against it: What, are we full of Cupids? Do we sail upon the vast, and resail, and fetch the Masque from the clouds? LEPIDO. Away Critick, thou never understoodst him. DROLLIO. Troth I confess it; but my comfort is, others are troubled with the same disease, ’tis epidemical, Lepido, take’t on my word, and so let’s in, and see how things go forward. Exeunt. (29–30)

44. Ben Jonson, prologue to The Sad Shepherd 1637 or earlier

First printed in volume ii of the 1640 folio, with a title-page dated 1641. Jonson had apparently defended the inclusion of comedy in the pastoral to Drummond: in Drummond’s notes of his conversations with Jonson in 1619, Jonson is reported as giving an account of a pastoral not in print, ‘intitled the May Lord’, in which, ‘contrary to all other pastoralls, he bringeth the Clownes making Mirth and foolish Sports’ (H & S, i, 143). He that hath feasted you these forty yeares, And fitted Fables, for your finer eares, Although at first, he scarce could hit the bore; Yet you, with patience harkning more and more, At length have growne up to him, and made knowne, The Working of his Pen is now your owne: He pray’s you would vouchsafe, for your owne sake, To heare him this once more, but, sit awake. And though hee now present you with such wooll, As from meere English Flocks his Muse can pull, He hopes when it is made up into Cloath; Not the most curious head here will be loath To weare a Hood of it; it being a Fleece, To match, or those of Sicily, or Greece. His Scene is Sherwood: And his Play a Tale Of Robin-hood’s inviting from the Vale Of Be’voir, all the Shep’ards to a Feast: Where, by the casuall absence of one Guest, The Mirth is troubled much, and in one Man As much of sadnesse showne, as Passion can. The sad young Shep’ard, whom wee here present, ⋆ Like his woes Figure, darke and discontent, For his lost Love; who in the Trent is said, To have miscarried; ’lasse! what knowes the head Of a calme River, whom the feet have drown’d? Heare what his sorrowes are; and, if they wound Your gentle brests, so that the End crowne all,

172 BEN JONSON

Which in the Scope of one dayes chance may fall: Old Trent will sent you more such Tales as these, And shall grow young againe, as one doth please.† But here’s an Heresie of late let fall; That Mirth by no meanes fits a Pastorall; Such say so, who can make none, he presumes: Else, there’s no Scene, more properly assumes The Sock. For whence can sport in kind arise, But from the Rurall Routs and Families? Safe on this ground then, wee not feare to day, To tempt your laughter by our rustick Play. Wherein if we distaste, or be cry’d downe, Wee thinke wee therefore shall not leave the Towne; Nor that the Fore-wits, that would draw the rest Unto their liking, alwayes like the best. The wise, and knowing Critick will not say, This worst, or better is, before he weigh; Where every piece be perfect in the kind: And then, though in themselves he difference find, Yet if the place require it where they stood, The equall fitting makes them equall good. You shall have Love and Hate, and Jealousie, As well as Mirth, and Rage, and Melancholy: Or whatsoever else may either move, Or stirre affections, and your likings prove. But that no stile for Pastorall should goe Current, but what is stamp’d with Ah, and O; Who judgeth so, may singularly erre; As if all Poesie had one Character: In which what were not written, were not right, Or that the man who made such one poore flight, In his whole life, had with his winged skill Advanc’d him upmost on the Muses hill. When he like Poet yet remaines, as those Are Painters who can only make a Rose. From such your wits redeeme you, or your chance, Lest to a greater height you doe advance Of Folly, to contemne those that are knowne Artificers, and trust such as are none. (119–20) NOTES • The sad Shep’ard passeth silently over the Stage. † Here the Prologue thinking to end, returnes upon a new purpose, and speakes on.

45. Sir John Suckling, Jonson’s arrogance 1637

From ‘A Sessions of the Poets’, first published in the posthumous Fragmenta Aurea (1646). Also referred to in the period by its alternative title, ‘The Wits’, Suckling’s poem describes a contest for the bays which Apollo awards in the end to an alderman, on the grounds that ‘the best signe/Of good store of wit’s to have good store of coyn’ (ll. 108–9). It may well have been the ‘Ballad made of the Wits’ sung to the king while on a hunting expedition in the New Forest in the late summer of 1637, and sent to the Earl of Strafford on 9 October that year: Thomas Clayton (ed.), The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works (Oxford 1971), p. xliv. As Clayton points out (p. 268), many of the ‘Wits’ mentioned in the poem, including Jonson, Sandys, and Waller, are known to have belonged to the circle of Lord Falkland (himself named in the poem). For Suckling, see No. 43, above. A Session was held the other day, And Apollo himself was at it (they say) The Laurel that had been so long reserv’d, Was now to be given to him best deserv’d. And Therefore the wits of the Town came thither, [’]T was strange to see how they flocked together, Each strongly confident of his own way, Thought to gain the Laurel away that day. ⋆⋆⋆ The first that broke silence was good old Ben, Prepar’d before with Canary wine, And he told them plainly he deserv’d the Bayes, For his were calld Works, where others were but Plaies. And Bid them remember how he had purg’d the Stage Of errors, that had lasted many an Age, And he hopes they did think the silent Woman, The Fox, and the Alchymist out done by no man. Apollo stopt him there, and bade him not go on,

174 BEN JONSON

’Twas merit, he said and not presumption Must carry’t; at which Ben turned about, And in great choler offer’d to go out: But Those that were there thought it not fit To discontent so ancient a wit; And therefore Apollo call’d him back agen, And made him mine host of his own new Inne. (stanzas 1 and 3–4; pp. 7–8)

46. James Shirley on Jonson and The Alchemist Between 1637 and 1640

‘A Prologue to the ALCHIMIST Acted there’, printed in Shirley’s Poems (1646). Shirley (1596–1666) became master of the grammar school at St Albans and then moved to London and established himself as the leading playwright of the Caroline stage. The present prologue must date from Shirley’s time as the resident dramatist at the Werburgh Street Playhouse, Dublin; he was there from its opening in late 1637 to April 1640, when he returned to England (see Allan H.Stevenson, ‘James Shirley and the Actors at the First Irish Theater’, Modern Philology (1942–3), 147–60). In the dedication of his The Gratefull Servant (1630) Shirley had called Jonson ‘our acknowledg’d Master’; in a commendatory verse in the same volume, William Habington claimed that Shirley would be Jonson’s successor, and after Jonson’s death verses by ‘Dru. Cooper’ and by W.Markham in Shirley’s The Royall Master (1638) declared Shirley his rightful heir. The Alchimist, a Play for strength of wit, And true Art, made to shame, what hath bin writ In former Ages: I except no worth Of what or Greek or Latines have brought forth, Is now to be presented to your eare, For which I wish each man were a Muse here. To know, and in his soule be fit to be Judge of this Master-piece of Comedie; That when we heare but once of Johnsons name, Whose mention shall make proud the breath of Fame, We may agree, and Crownes of Laurel bring A justice unto him the Poets King. But he is dead, Time envious of that blisse, Which we possest in that great Braine of his, By putting out this light, hath darkned all The sphere of Poesie, and we let fall At best, unworthy Elegies on his Herse, A Tribute that we owe his living Verse; Which though some men that never reacht him, may Decry, that love all folly in a Play, The Wiser few shall this distinction have,

176 BEN JONSON

To kneele, not tread upon his honour’d grave. (36–7)

47. Newcastle, tribute to Jonson 1637 or later

‘To Ben: Jonson’s Ghost’, printed from a manuscript at Welbeck in Welbeck Miscellany No. 2: A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, ed. Francis Needham (Bungay 1934). William Cavendish (1592–1676) was created Earl of Newcastle in 1638 and Duke of Newcastle in 1665. He was a patron of Hobbes, Brome, Davenant, Shirley, and Dryden as well as of Jonson, and himself wrote poems, plays, and treatises on horsemanship. The first evidence of Jonson’s association with him is an epitaph on his father, Sir Charles Cavendish, who died in 1619 (U.V., 22); in Jonson’s last years, Newcastle employed him to write the masques for his entertainments for the king and queen at Welbeck in 1633 and at Bolsover in 1634. In a letter of 1634 Jonson tells the duke that his payment for the masques ‘fell like the dewe of heaven on my necessities’ (H & S, i, 212). Jonson wrote poems on Newcastle’s horsemanship and on his fencing (Und., 53, 59). Newcastle became governor of the Prince of Wales and Privy Councillor in 1638; he was a Royalist commander in the north in the Civil War, was exiled and had his estates confiscated under the Commonwealth, and after the Restoration retired from public life. His play The Varietie (1649) includes a parody of Jonson’s ‘Have you seen but a bright lily grow’ (p. 57). I would write of Thee, Ben; not to approve My witt or Learneing; but my Judgement, Love. But when I think or this or that, to chuse; Each part of Thee, is too big for my Muse. Should I compare Thee to Rome’s dust, that’s dead? Their witt, to Thine’s as heavy as thy lead: Should I prophane thee to our liveing Men? Th’are light as strawes, and feathers to Thee, Ben. Did wee want Ballads for these shallow tymes, Or for our winter Nights, some sporting rhymes; For such weake trifles, wee have witts great store; Now thou art gone, there’s not a Poet more. Our Country’s Glory! Wee may justly boast Thus much; more would but raise thy angry Ghost. We may with sadder blacks behange thy hearse;

178 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

All els, were Libells on ourselves, if Verse. Rest then, in Peace, in our vast Mothers wombe, Thou art a Monument, without a Tombe. Is any Infidel? Let him but looke And read, Hee may be saved by thy Booke. (43)

48. George Stutvile, Jonson as tutor 1637 or later

‘The Genius of the stage Dep[l]oring the death of Ben Johnson’, included in Nicholas Burghe’s commonplace book, now Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 38. Adopting the emendation in H & S, xi, 487, of ‘Men’ for ‘then’, l. 48. [In the first part of the poem the Genius laments the world’s loss, and heaven’s gain, of so great a poet.] ⋆⋆⋆ This one must bee the best and stand alone without comparison (disgracing none) I know that am the Genius of the stage & here pronounce it spight of Crettique rage Who fill’d the Theaters, with knowing men & made them soe, but hee, (renowned Ben) Whose workes deservd, but his, and Cost? and Men were happye when thay payd for[’]t most. Thay came desciples to attend his preachers but went a way confirmd Juditious teachers Who satt at others workes like Judges sterne At Johnsons actes were pupills sett to learne Who read him true must know, read knowe much more Then his wise Tutor ever taught before Lay by his looser Poemes (though each one wolde not disgrace Apollo to have done[)] and reade his sceans; seeme but to love strong sence & it shall ravish thyn intelligence. Marke wheare hee courts Thalia you will bee Translated with his Ingenuity But when hee Cloathes his Buskind muse with horror Gules her with blood, bedeckes her face with terror Your flesh shall num, Heare tremble to rehearse The soule-affrighting numbers of his verse This made Ben Johnson soe admir’d att Courte That could create their sadnes & their sporte

180 BEN JONSON

This made hym favourd of two mightye kings Lov’d of the nobles, feard of the meaner things This makes mee weep (though hee hath left behinde The stocke of witt, and that the Age shall find) weep and pray like an Indulgent Mother That my Sonns soule may flie into some other, And what the stage must want, now hee is gon It may regayne by Transmygration. (ll. 41–74; pp. 97–8)

49. Tributes from Jonsonus Virbius 1638

Jonsonus Virbius: Or, The Memorie of Ben: Johnson Revived by the Friends of the Muses is a collection of thirty-three elegies on Jonson’s death, edited by Bryan Duppa, Bishop of Chichester. According to Aubrey, it was Lord Falkland who suggested the title (H & S, xi, 428). See Introduction, pp. 8–9. (a) Falkland, ‘An Eglogue on the Death of BEN JOHNSON, between Melybaeus and Hylas’. Printed first in the collection. For Falkland, see No. 37, above. [Hylas (evidently Falkland) begins by declaring his grief to Melybaeus at the death of Jonson. (Dorus in the extract below must be Sir Henry Morison.)] Mel. Ah Hylas! then thy griefe I cannot call A passion, when the ground is rationall. I now excuse thy teares and sighs, though those To deluges, and these to tempests rose: Her great instructer gone, I know the Age No lesse laments then doth the widdow’d stage, And onely Vice and Folly, now are glad, Our Gods are troubled, and our Prince is sad: He chiefly who bestowes light, health and art, Feeles this sharpe griefe pierce his immortall heart, He his neglected Lire away hath throwne, And wept a larger nobler Helicon, To find his Hearbs, which to his wish prevaile, For the lesse lov’d should his owne favorite faile: So moan’d himselfe when Daphne he ador’d, That arts relieving al, should faile their Lord: Hyl. But say, from whence in thee this knowledge springs, Of what his favour was with Gods and Kings. Mel. Dorus, who long had known books, men, & townes, At last the honour of our Woods and Downes, Had often heard his Songs, was often fir’d With their inchanting power, ere he retir’d,

182 BEN JONSON

And ere himselfe to our still groves he brought, To meditate on what his Muse had taught: Here all his joy was to revolve alone, All that her Musicke to his soule had showne, Or in all meetings to divert the streame Of our discourse; and make his Friend his Theame, And praising works which that rare Loome hath weav’d, Impart that pleasure which he had receav’d, So in sweet notes (which did all tunes excell, But what he prais’d) I oft have heard him tell Of His rare Pen, what was the use and price, The Bayes of Vertue and the scourge of Vice: How the rich ignorant he valued least, Nor for the trappings would esteeme the beast: But did our youth to noble actions raise, Hoping the meed of his immortall praise: How bright and soone His Muses morning shone, Her Noone how lasting, and her Evening none: How speech exceeds not dumbenesse, nor verse prose, More then His verse the low rough rimes of those, (For such his scene, they seem’d,) who highest rear’d, Possest Parnassus ere his power appear’d: Nor shall another Pen his fame dissolve, Till we this doubtfull Probleme can resolve, Which in his workes we most transcendent see, Wit, Judgement, Learning, Art, or Industry, Which Till is Never, so all jointly flow, And each doth to an equall Torrent grow: His Learning such, no Author old nor new, Escapt his reading that deserv’d his view, And such his Judgement, so exact his Test, Of what was best in Bookes, as what bookes best, That had he joyn’d those notes his Labours tooke, From each most prais’d and praise-deserving Booke, And could the world of that choise Treasure boast, It need not care though all the rest were lost: And such his Wit, He writ past what he quotes, And his Productions farre exceed his Notes: So in his workes where ought inserted growes, The noblest of the Plants engrafted showes, That his adopted Children equall not, The generous Issue his owne Braine begot: So great his Art, that much which he did write, Gave the wise wonder, and the Crowd delight, Each sort as well as sex admir’d his Wit, The Hees and Shees, the Boxes, and the Pit; And who lesse lik’t within, did rather chuse To taxe their Judgements then suspect his Muse,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 183

How no spectator his chaste stage could call The cause of any crime of his, but all With thoughts and wils purg’d and amended rise, From th’ Ethicke Lectures of his Comedies, Where the Spectators act, and the sham’d age Blusheth to meet her follies on the stage; Where each man finds some Light he never sought, And leaves behind some vanitie he brought, Whose Politicks no lesse the minds direct, Then these the manners, nor with lesse effect, When his Majesticke Tragedies relate All the disorders of a Tottering state, All the distempers which on Kingdomes fall, When ease, and wealth, and vice are generall, And yet the minds against all feare assure, And telling the disease, prescribe the Cure: Where, as he tels what subtle wayes, what friends (Seeking their wicked and their wisht for ends) Ambitious and luxurious Persons prove, Whom vast desires, or mighty wants doth move, The generall Frame, to sap and undermine, In proud Sejanus, and bold Cateline; So in his vigilant Prince and Consuls parts, He shewes the wiser and the nobler Arts, By which a state may be unhurt, upheld, And all those workes destroy’d, which hell would build. Who (not like those who with small praise had writ, Had they not cal’d in Judgement to their Wit) Us’d not a tutoring hand his to direct, But was sole workeman and sole Architect: And sure by what my Friend did daily tell, If he but acted his owne part as well As he writ those of others, he may boast, The happy fields hold not a happier ghost. Hyl. Strangers will thinke this strange, yet he (deare Youth,) Where most he past beleefe, fell short of Truth: Say on, what more he said, this gives reliefe, And though it raise my cause, it bates my griefe, Since Fates decreed him now no longer liv’d, I joy to heare him by thy Friend reviv’d. Mel. More he would say, and better, (but I spoile His smoother words with my unpolisht stile) And having told what pitch his worth attain’d, He then would tell us what Reward it gain’d; How in an ignorant, and learn’d age he swaid, (Of which the first he found, the second made) How He, when he could know it, reapt his Fame, And long out-liv’d the envy of his Name:

184 BEN JONSON

To him how daily flockt, what reverence gave, All that had wit, or would be thought to have, Or hope to gaine, and in so large a store, That to his Ashes they can pay no more, Except those few who censuring, thought not so, But aim’d at glory from so great a foe: How the wise too, did with meere wits agree, As Pembroke, Portland, and grave Aubigny; Nor thought the rigid’st Senator a shame, To contribute to so deserv’d a fame: How great Eliza, the Retreate of those, Who weake and injur’d her protection chose, Her Subjects joy, the strength of her Allies, The feare and wonder of her Enemies, With her judicious favours did infuse Courage and strength into his yonger Muse: How learned JAMES, whose praise no end shall finde, (But still enjoy a Fame pure like his Mind) Who favour’d quiet, and the Arts of Peace, (Which in his Halcion dayes found large encrease) Friend to the humblest if deserving Swaine, Who was himself a part of Phœbus Traine, Declar’d great JOHNSON worthiest to receive The Garland which the Muses hands did weave, And though his Bounty did sustaine his dayes, Gave a more welcome Pension in his praise: How mighty Charles amidst that Weighty care, In which three Kingdomes as their Blessing share, Whom as it tends with ever watchfull eyes, That neither Power may force, nor Art surprise, So bounded by no shore, graspes all the Maine, And farre as Neptune claimes, extends his reigne. Found still some Time to heare and to admire, The happy sounds of his Harmonious Lire, And oft hath left his bright exalted Throne, And to his Muses feet combin’d His owne:⋆ As did his Queene, whose Person so disclos’d A brighter Nimph then any Part impos’d, When she did joyne, by an Harmonious choise, Her gracefull Motions to his Powerful voice: How above all the rest was Phœbus fir’d With love of Arts, which he himselfe inspir’d, Nor oftner by his Light our Sence was chear’d, Then he in Person to his sight appear’d, Nor did he write a line but to supply, With sacred Flame the Radiant God was by. (ll. 43–206; pp. 2–7)

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 185

[In the last part of the eclogue, Melybaeus persuades a reluctant Hylas to raise a monument to Jonson in verse.] (b) Sir John Beaumont, ‘TO THE MEMORY OF him who can never be forgotten, Master BENJAMIN JOHNSON’. Jonson contributed a commendatory poem (U.V., 32) to Bosworth-field (1629), a volume of verses by Sir John Beaumont (1583–1627), father of the Sir John Beaumont who wrote this poem (and edited his father’s verses), and brother to the playwright Francis Beaumont. Had this bin for some meaner Poets Hearse, I might have then observ’d the lawes of verse: But here they faile, nor can I hope t’expresse In Numbers, what the world grants Numberlesse; Such are the Truths, we ought to speake of Thee, Thou great refiner of our Poesie, Who turn’st to gold that which before was lead; Then with that pure Elixar rais’d the dead. Nine Sisters who (for all the Poets lyes) Had bin deem’d Mortall, did not JOHNSON rise And with celestiall Sparkes (not stolne) revive Those who could erst keep winged Fame alive: T’was he that found (plac’t) in the seat of wit, Dull grinning Ignorance, and banish’t it; He on the prostituted Stage appeares To make men heare, not by their eyes, but eares; Who painted Vertues, that each one might know, And point the man, that did such Treasure owe: So that who could in JOHNSONS lines be high Needed not Honours, or a Ribbon buy: But vice he onely shew’d us in a glasse, Which by reflection of those rayes that passe, Retaines the figure lively, set before, And that withdrawne, reflects at us no more; So, he observ’d the like Decorum, when He whipt the vices, and yet spar’d the men; When heretofore, the vices onely note, And signe from vertue [w]as his party-coate, When Devils were the last Men on the Stage, And pray’d for plenty, and the present Age; Nor was our English language, onely bound To thanke him, for he Latin Horace found (Who so inspir’d Rome, with his Lyricke song) Translated in the Macaronicke toung, Cloth’d in such raggs, as one might safely vow, That his Mæcenas, would not owne him now;

186 BEN JONSON

On him he tooke this pitty, as to cloth In words, and such expression, as for both, Ther’s none but judgeth the exchange will come To twenty more, then when he sold at Rome. Since then, he made our Language pure and good, And teach us speake, but what we understood, We owe this praise to him, that should we joyne To pay him, he were payd but with the coyne Himselfe hath minted, which we know by this That no words passe for currant now, but his; And though He in a blinder age could change Faults to perfections, yet ’twas farre more strange To see (how ever times, and fashions frame) His wit and language still remaine the same In all mens mouths; Grave Preachers did it use As golden Pills, by which they might infuse Their Heavenly Physicke; Ministers of State Their grave dispatches in his language wrate; Ladies made cur’tsies in them, Courtiers, legs, Physicians Bills, perhaps some Pedant begs He may not use it, for he heares ’tis such, As in few words, a man may utter much. Could I have spoken in his language too, I had not said so much, as now I doe, To whose cleare memory, I this tribute send Who Dead’s my wonder, Living was my Friend. (11–13) (c) Sir Thomas Hawkins, ‘TO THE MEMORY OF M.BENJAMIN JONSON’.

Hawkins (d. 1640), a Roman Catholic, succeeded to the family estates in 1617 and was knighted in 1618. He published a translation of the Odes and Epodes of Horace (1625). Howell says that it was Hawkins who solicited his contribution to Jonsonus Virbius (Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1650 edition), i, 217), and Howell’s letter about Jonson’s boasting at a dinner was addressed to Hawkins (see No. 36(e), above). To presse into the throng, where Wits thus strive To make thy Lawrels fading Tombes survive, Argues thy worth, their love, my bold desire, Somewhat to sing, though but to fill the Quire: But (Truth to speake) what Muse can silent be, Or little say, that hath for Subject, Thee, Whose Poems such, that as the Sphere of fire, They warme insensibly, and Force inspire, Knowledge, and wit infuse, mute tongues unlose, And wayes not track’t to write, and speake disclose. But when thou put’st thy Tragique Buskin on, Or Comique Socke of mirthfull Action, Actors, as if inspired from thy hand,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 187

Speake, beyond what they thinke, lesse, understand. And thirsty Hearers wonder-strucken say, Thy words make that a Truth, was meant a Play. Folly, and braine-sicke Humours of the time, Distempered Passion, audacious Crime, Thy Pen so on the stage doth personate, That ere men scarce begin to know, they hate The Vice presented, and there lessons learne, Virtue, from vicious Habits to discerne. Oft have I scene Thee in a sprightly straine, To lash a Vice, and yet no one complaine, Thou threw’st the Inke of Malice from Thy Pen, Whose aime was evill manners, not ill men. Let then fraile parts repose, where solemne care Of pious Friends, thee Pyramids prepare; And take thou (BEN) from Verse a second breath, Which shall create Thee new, and conquer Death. (14–15) (d) Henry King, ‘Upon BEN. JOHNSON’.

King (1592–1669) was the eldest son of John King, Bishop of London. He was himself appointed Bishop of Chichester in 1642, and preached Duppa’s funeral sermon in 1662; he and Donne were close friends. A collected edition of his Poems was published in 1657, including this elegy on Jonson. What ends soever other Quils invite, I can protest, it was no itch to write, Nor any vaine ambition to be read, But meerely love and justice to the dead, Which rais’d my famelesse Muse; and caus’d her bring These drops, as tribute throwne into that Spring, To whose most rich and fruitfull head we owe The purest streames of language which can flow. For ’tis but truth; Thou taughtst the ruder Age, To speake by Grammer; and reformd’st the Stage: Thy Comick Sock induc’d such purged sense, A Lucrece might have heard without offence. Amongst those soaring Wits that did dilate Our English, and advance it to the rate And value it now holds, thy selfe was one Helpt lift it up to such proportion, That thus refin’d and roab’d it shall not spare With the full Greeke or Latine to compare. For what Tongue ever durst, but Ours, translate Great Tullies Eloquence, or Homers State? Both which in their unblemisht lustre shine, From Chapmans Pen, and from thy CATILINE. All I would aske for thee, in recompence

188 BEN JONSON

Of thy successfull toyle, and times expence Is onely this poore boone: That those who can Perhaps read French, or talke Italian, Or doe the lofty Spaniard affect, (To shew their skill in forreigne dialect) Prove not themselves so unnat’rally wise They therefore should their Mother-tongue despise: (As if her Poets both for stile and witt, Not equal’d, or not pass’d their best that writt) Until by studying JOHNSON they have knowne The heighth, and strength, and plentie of their owne. Thus in what low earth, or neglected roome, So ere thou sleepst, thy BOOKE shall be thy Tombe, Thou wilt goe downe a happie Coarse, bestrew’d With thine owne Flowres and feele thy selfe renew’d, Whilst thy immortall, never with’ring Bayes Shall yearely flourish in thy Readers praise. And when more spreading Titles are forgot, Or, spight of all their Lead and Seare-cloth, rot; Thou wrapt and shrin’d in thine owne sheets wilt lye A Relique fam’d by all Posteritie. (ll. 16–60; pp. 16–18) (e) Dudley Digges, ‘AN ELEGIE ON BEN JOHNSON’.

Digges (1613–43) was the third son of the Sir Dudley Digges, diplomat, who may have written a commendatory verse in the 1607 Volpone quarto (see No. 19(f), above). He became a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, in 1633. He published a number of writings in defence of King Charles I. O could we weepe like Thee! we might convay New breath, and raise men from their Beds of Clay Unto a life of fame; he is not dead, Who by thy Muses hath beene buried. Thrice happy those brave Heroes, whom I meet Wrapt in thy writings, as their winding-sheet: For, when tribute unto Nature due, Was payd, they did receive new life from you; Which shall not be undated, since thy breath Is able to immortall, after death. Thus rescu’d from the dust, they did ne’re see True life, untill they were entomb’d by Thee. You that pretend to Courtship, here admire Those pure and active flames, Love did inspire: And though he could have tooke his Mistresse eares, Beyond fain’d sighs, false oaths, and forced teares; His heat was still so modest, it might warme, But doe the Cloystred Votarie no harme.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 189

The face he sometimes praises, but the mind, A fairer Saint, is in his Verse inshrin’d. He that would worthily set downe his prayse, Should studie Lines as loftie as his Playes. The Roman Worthies did not seeme to fight With braver spirit, then we see him write: His Pen their valour equals; and that Age Receives a greater glory from our Stage. Bold Catiline, at once Romes hate and feare, Farre higher in his storie doth appeare: The flames those active Furies did inspire, Ambition and Revenge, his better fire Kindles afresh; thus lighted, they shall Till Rome to its first nothing doe returne. Brave fall, had but the cause beene likewise good! Had he so, for his Countrey, lost his blood! Some like not Tully in his owne; yet while All doe admire him in thy English stile, I censure not; I rather thinke, that wee May well his equall, thine we ne’re shall see. (ll. 26–64; pp. 23–4) (f) Edmund Waller, ‘Upon BEN: JOHNSON, the most excellent of Comick POETS’. The elegy was reprinted in Waller’s Poems (1645).

Waller (1606–87) was educated at Eton, Cambridge, and Lincoln’s Inn; he was wealthy, an MP and a member of the Falkland circle. His Poems were published in 1645 and went through three editions; he was highly regarded by his contemporaries as a reformer of English verse. In his elegy he imagines Jonson as Proteus—a creator of characters whose own character escapes detection (see Introduction, p. 9); and, unusually, he pictures the comedies as enshrining virtues, rather than as depicting vices. Mirror of Poets! Mirror of our Age! Which her whol Face beholding on thy stage, Pleas’d and displeas’d with her owne faults endures, A remedy, like those whom Musicke cures, Thou not alone those various inclinations, Which Nature gives to Ages, Sexes, Nations, Hast traced with thy All-resembling Pen, But all that custome hath impos’d on Men, Or ill-got Habits, which distort them so, That scarce the Brother can the Brother know, Is represented to the wondring Eyes, Of all that see or read thy Comedies. Who ever in those Glasses lookes may finde, The spots return’d, or graces, of his minde; And by the helpe of so divine an Art, At leisure view, and dresse, his nobler part.

190 BEN JONSON

Narcissus cozen’d by that flattering Well, Which nothing could but of his beauty tell, Had here discovering the deform’d estate Of his fond minde, preserv’d himselfe with hate, But Vertue too, as well as Vice, is clad, In flesh and blood so well, that Plato had Beheld what his high Fancie once embrac’d, Vertue with colours, speech and motion grac’d. The sundry Postures of Thy copious Muse, Who would expresse a thousand tongues must use, Whose Fates no lesse peculiar then thy Art, For as thou couldst all characters impart, So none can render thine, who still escapes, Like Proteus in variety of shapes, Who was nor this nor that, but all we finde, And all we can imagine in mankind. (30–1) (g) Sidney Godolphin, ‘The Muses fairest light in no darke time’.

A fine, energetic encomium. In the volume Godolphin’s name is just visible beneath the poem, obscured by a wide decorative border, as Sister Maria Teresa points out in ‘Sidney Godolphin and “The Muses Fairest Light”’, Modern Language Notes (1946), lxi, 61–3. Godolphin (1610–43) was a Royalist of the Falkland circle, killed at the Battle of Chagford. He was in Parliament in 1628 and 1640. He left many poems in manuscript at his death; Waller completed his translation from Virgil, The Passion of Dido for Aeneas (published 1658). Falkland in his elegy (No. 49 (a)) includes him in ‘that inspired traine’ who are to commemorate Jonson. The Muses fairest light in no darke time, The Wonder of a learned Age; the Line Which none can passe; the most proportion’d Witt, To Nature, the best Judge of what was fit; The deepest, plainest, highest, cleerest PEN; The Voice most eccho’d by consenting Men, The Soule which answer’d best to all well said By others, and which most requitall made, Tun’d to the highest Key of ancient ROME, Returning all her Musique with his owne, In whom with Nature, Studie claim’d a part, And yet who to himself ow’d all his Art: Heere lies BEN JOHNSON, every Age will looke With sorrow heere, with wonder on his BOOKE. (27 (really 35)) (h) Jasper Mayne, ‘To the Memory of BEN JOHNSON’.

Jasper Mayne (1604–72) wrote the plays The City Match (1639) and The Amorous War (1648); he became Archdeacon of Chichester. His ode records the charges of Jonson’s enemies— his slowness, his need for alcohol in composing, and the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 191

accusation that Carlo Buffone in Every Man out of his Humour, in particular, is a vengeful caricature of a contemporary individual (Aubrey names the original of Carlo as the jester Charles Chester: H & S, ix, 405). Mayne testifies, too, to the popularity of plays like Volpone and The Alchemist, and pays specific tribute to Jonson’s verse (he calls him ‘Prince of Numbers’). As when the Vestall hearth went out, no fire Lesse holy then the flame that did expire Could kindle it againe: So at thy fall Our Witt, great BEN, is too Apocryphall To celebrate the losse, since tis too much To write thy Epitaph, and not bee such. What thou wert, like th’ hard Oracles of old, Without an extasie cannot bee told. We must be ravisht first, Thou must infuse Thy selfe into us both the Theame and Muse. Else, (though wee all conspir’d to make thy Herse Our Workes) so that ’t had beene but one great Verse, Though the Priest had translated for that time The Liturgy, and buried thee in Rime, So that in Meeter wee had heard it said, Poetique dust is to Poetique laid: And though that dust being Shakespears thou might’st have Not his roome, but the Poet for thy grave; So that, as thou didst Prince of Numbers dye And live, so now thou mightst in Numbers lie, ’Twere fraile solemnitie; Verses on Thee And not like thine, would but kind Libels be; And we, (not speaking thy whole Worth) should raise Worse blots, then they that envied thy praise. Indeed, thou need’st us not, since above all Invention, thou wert thine owne Funerall. Hereafter, when Time hath fed on thy Tombe, Th’inscription worne out, and the Marble dumbe; So that ’twould pose a Critick to restore Halfe words, and words expir’d so long before. When thy maym’d Statue hath a sentenc’d face, And lookes that are the horror of the place, That ’twill be learning, and Antiquitie, And aske a SELDEN to say, this was Thee, Thou’lt have a whole Name still, nor needst thou feare That will be ruin’d, or lose nose, or haire. Let others write so thin, that they can’t be Authors till rotten, no Posteritie Can adde to thy Workes; th’had their whole growth then When first borne, and came aged from thy Pen. Whilst living thou enjoy’dst the fame and sense

192 BEN JONSON

Of all that time gives but the reverence. When th’art of Homers yeares, no man will say Thy Poems are lesse worthy, but more gray: Tis Bastard-Poetry, and o’th’ false blood Which can’t without succession be good. Things that will alwayes last, doe thus agree With things eternall; th’at once perfect bee. Scorne then their censures, who gav’t out, thy Witt As long upon a Comœdie did sit As Elephants bring forth; and that thy blotts And mendings tooke more time then Fortune plotts: That such thy drought was, and so great thy thirst, That all thy Playes were drawne at th’ Mermaid first: That the Kings yearely Butt wrote, and his Wine Hath more right then thou to thy CATILINE. Let such men keep a diet, let their witt Be rackt, and while they write, suffer a fitt: When th’have felt tortures which out-paine the gout, Such, as with lesse, the State drawes treason out; Though they should the length of consumptions lie Sicke of their verse, and of their Poem die, ’Twould not be thy worst Scæne, but would at last Confirme their boastings, and shew made in hast. He that writes well, writes quick, since the rule’s true, Nothing is slowly done, that’s alwayes new. So when thy FOXE had ten times acted beene, Each day was first, but that ’twas cheaper scene. And so thy ALCHYMIST plaid ore and ore, Was new oth’ Stage when ’twas not at the dore. Wee, like the Actors did repeat, the Pit The first time saw, the next conceiv’d thy Wit: Which was cast in those forms, such rules, such Arts, That but to some not halfe thy Acts were parts: Since of some silken judgements we may say, They fill’d a Boxe two houres, but saw no Play. So that th’unlearned lost their money, and Schollers sav’d onely, that could understand. Thy Scæne was free from Monsters, no hard Plot Call’d downe a God t’untie th’unlikely knot. The Stage was still a Stage, two entrances Were not two parts oth’ World, disjoyn’d by Seas. Thine were land-Tragedies, no Prince was found To swim a whole Scæne out, then oth’ Stage drown’d; Pitch’t fields, as Red-Bull wars, still felt thy doome, Thou laidst no sieges to the Musique-Roome; Nor wouldst allow thy best Comœdies Humours that should above the People rise: Yet was thy language and thy stile so high,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 193

Thy Socke to th’ ancle, Buskin reacht to th’ thigh; And both so chast, so ’bove Dramatick cleane, That we both safely saw, and liv’d thy Scene. No foule loose line did prostitute thy wit, Thou wrot’st thy Comœdies, didst not commit. We did the vice arraignd not tempting heare, And were made Judges, not bad parts by th’ eare. For Thou ev’n sinne didst in such words array, That some who came bad parts, went out good play. Which ended not with th’ Epilogue, the Age Still acted, which grew innocent from th’ Stage. Tis true thou hadst some sharpnesse, but thy salt Serv’d but with pleasure to reforme the fault. Men were laugh’d into vertue, and none more Hated Face acted then were such before. So did thy sting no bloud, but humours draw, So much doth Satyre more correct then Law; Which was not nature in thee, as some call Thy teeth, who say thy wit lay in thy Gall. That thou didst quarrell first, and then, in spight, Didst ’gainst a person of such vices write: That ’twas revenge, not truth, that on the Stage Carlo was not presented, but thy Rage: And that when thou in company wert met, Thy meate tooke notes, and thy discourse was net. Wee know thy free-veine had this innocence, To spare the partie, and to brand th’ offence. And the just indignation thou wert in Did not expose Shift, but his tricks and ginne. Thou mightst have us’d th’ old Comick freedome, these Might have seene themselves plaid, like Socrates. Like Cleon, Mammon might the Knight have beene, If, as Greeke Authors, thou hadst turn’d Greeke spleene; And hadst not chosen rather to translate Their learning into English, not their rate: Indeed this last, if thou hadst beene bereft Of thy humanitie, might be cal’d Theft. The other was not; whatsoere was stange Or borrow’d in thee did grow thine by th’ change. Who without Latine helps had’st beene as rare As Beaumont, Fletcher, or as Shakespeare were: And like them, from thy native Stock could’st say, Poets and Kings are not borne every day. (29–33 (really 37–41)) (i) William Cartwright, ‘In the memory of the most Worthy BENJAMIN JOHNSON’.

194 BEN JONSON

Cartwright (1611–43), one of Jonson’s ‘Sons’, was a dramatist and divine. In 1642 Bishop Duppa, the editor of Jonsonus Virbius, appointed him to a post in the church of Salisbury. Cartwright’s tragi-comedy, The Royal Slave, was acted before the king and queen at Oxford in 1636; he was a member of the king’s Council of War when he died in 1643. For his commendatory poem to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies, see No. 54, below. Both that poem and the present elegy are reprinted in the posthumous collection of Cart-wright’s Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, With other Poems (1651); the preface to that volume quotes Jonson as saying, ‘My Son Cartwright writes all like a Man’, and marvels at Cartwright’s verses on Jonson (quoted in Jesse Franklin Bradley and Joseph Quincy Adams (eds), The Jonson Allusion-Book (New Haven, Conn. 1922), p. 296). William Stanton in a commendatory verse in the same volume says the elegy is ‘so high and wisely writ, / It shews who is and who is not a Wit’ (The Jonson Allusion-Book, P. 297). Father of Poets, though thine owne great day Struck from thy selfe, scornes that a weaker ray Should twine in lustre with it: yet my flame, Kindled from thine, flies upwards tow’rds thy Name. For in the acclamation of the lesse There’s Piety, though from it no accesse. And though my ruder thoughts make me of those, Who hide and cover what they should disclose: Yet, where the lustre’s such, he makes it scene Better to some, that drawes the veile betweene. And what can more be hop’d, since that divine Free filling spirit tooke its flight with thine? Men may have fury, but no raptures now; Like Witches, charme, yet not know whence, nor how. And through distemper, grown not strong but fierce; In stead of writing, onely rave in verse: Which when by thy Lawes judg’d, ’twill be confes’d, ’Twas not to be inspir’d, but be posses’d. Where shall we find a Muse like thine, that can So well present and shew man unto man, That each one finds his twin, and thinkes thy Art Extends not to the gestures, but the heart? Where one so shewing life to life, that we Think thou taughtst Custome, and not Custome thee? Manners, that were Themes to thy Scenes still flow In the same streame, and are their comments now: These times thus living o’re thy Modells, we Thinke them not so much wit, as prophesie: And though we know the character, may sweare A Sybill’s finger hath bin busie there. Things common thou speakst proper, which though known For publique, stampt by thee grow thence thine owne: Thy thoughts so order’d, so expres’d, that we

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 195

Conclude that thou didst not discourse, but see Language so master’d, that thy numerous feet, Laden with genuine words, doe alwaies meet Each in his art; nothing unfit doth fall, Shewing the Poet, like the wiseman, All: Thine equall skill thus wresting nothing, made Thy penne seeme not so much to write as trade. That life, that Venus of all things, which we Conceive or shew, proportion’d decencie, Is not found scattred in thee here and there, But, like the soule, is wholly every where. No strange perplexed maze doth passe for plot, Thou alwayes dost unty, not cut the knot. Thy Lab’rinths doores are open’d by one thread That tyes, and runnes through all that’s don or said. No power comes down with learned hat and rod, Wit onely, and contrivance is thy god. ’Tis easie to guild gold: there’s small skill spent Where ev’n the first rude masse is ornament: Thy Muse tooke harder metalls, purg’d and boild, Labour’d and try’d, heated, and beate and toyld, Sifted the drosse, fil’d roughnes, then gave dresse, Vexing rude subjects into comlinesse. Be it thy glory then, that we may say, Thou run’st where th’ foote was hindred by the way. Nor dost thou poure out, but dispence thy veine, Skill’d when to spare, and when to entertaine: Not like our wits, who into one piece do Throw all that they can say, and their friends too, Pumping themselves, for one Termes noise so dry, As if they made their wills in Poetry. And such spruce compositions presse the stage, When men transcribe themselves, and not the age. Both sorts of Playes are thus like pictures showne, Thine of the common life, theirs of their owne. Thy modells yet are not so fram’d, as we May call them libells, and not imag’rie: No name on any Basis: ’tis thy skill To strike-the vice, but spare the person still: As he, who when he saw the Serpent wreath’d About his sleeping sonne, and as he breath’d, Drinke in his soule, did so the shoot contrive, To kill the beast, but keepe the child alive. So dost thou aime thy darts, which, ev’n when They kill the poisons, do but wake the men. Thy thunders thus but purge, and we endure Thy launcings better then anothers cure, And justly too: for th’ age growes more unsound

196 BEN JONSON

From the fooles balsam, then the wisemans wound. No rotten talke brokes for a laugh; no page Commenc’d man by th’ instructions of thy stage; No bargaining line there; no provoc’tive verse; Nothing but what Lucretia might rehearse; No need to make good count’nance ill, and use The plea of strict life for a looser Muse: No Woman rul’d thy quill: we can descry No verse borne under any Cynthia’s eye: Thy Starre was judgement onely, and right sense, Thy selfe being to thy selfe an influence. Stout beauty is thy grace: Sterne pleasures do Present delights, but mingle horrours too: Thy Muse doth thus like Joves fierce girle appeare, With a fair hand, but grasping of a Speare. Where are they now that cry, thy Lamp did drinke More oyle then th’ Authour wine, while he did thinke? We do imbrace their slaunder: thou has writ Not for dispatch but fame; no market wit: ’Twas not thy care, that it might passe and sell, But that it might endure, and be done well: Nor would’st thou venture it unto the eare, Untill the file would not make smooth, but weare: Thy verse came season’d hence, and would not give; Borne not to feed the Authour, but to live: Whence ’mong the choycer Judges rise a strife, To make thee read as Classick in thy life. Those that doe hence applause, and suffrage begge, ’Cause they can Poems forme upon one legge, Write not to time, but to the Poets day: There’s difference between fame, and sodaine pay. These men sing Kingdomes falls, as if that fate Us’d the same force t’ a Village, and a State: These serve Thyestes bloody supper in, As if it had onely a sallad bin: Their Catilines are but Fencers, whose fights rise Not to the fame of battell, but of prize. But thou still put’st true passions on; dost write With the same courage that try’d Captaines fight; Giv’st the right blush and colour unto things; Low without creeping, high without losse of wings; Smooth, yet not weake, and by a thorough-care, Bigge without swelling, without painting faire: They wretches, while they cannot stand to fit, Are not wits, but materialls of wit. What though thy searching wit did rake the dust Of time, and purge old mettalls of their rust? Is it no labour, no art, thinke they, to

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 197

Snatch Shipwracks from the deepe, as Dyvers do? And rescue Jewells from the covetous sand, Making the Seas hid wealth adorne the Land? What though thy culling Muse did rob the store Of Greeke, and Latine gardens to bring ore Plants to thy native soyle? Their vertues were Improv’d farre more, by being planted here. If thy Still to their essence doth refine So many drugges, is not the water thine? Thefts thus become just works: they and their grace Are wholly thine: thus doth the stampe and face Make that the Kings, that’s ravisht from the mine: In others then ’tis oare, in thee ’tis coine. Blest life of Authours, unto whom we owe Those that we have, and those that we want too: Th’ art all so good, that reading makes thee worse, And to have writ so well’s thine onely curse. Secure then of thy merit, thou didst hate That servile base dependance upon fate: Successe thou ne’r thoughtst vertue, nor that fit, Which chance, and th’ ages fashion did make hit; Excluding those from life in after-time, Who into Po’try first brought luck and rime: Who thought the peoples breath good ayre: sty’ld name What was but noise; and getting Briefes for fame Gathered the many’s suffrages, and thence Made commendation a benevolence: Thy thoughts were their owne Lawrell, and did win That best applause of being crown’d within. And though th’ exacting age, when deeper yeeres Had interwoven snow among thy haires, Would not permit thou shouldst grow old, cause they Nere by thy writings knew thee young; we may Say justly, they’re ungratefull, when they more Condemn’d thee, cause thou wert so good before: Thine Art was thine Arts blurre, and they’ll confesse Thy strong perfumes made them not smell thy lesse. But, though to erre with thee be no small skill, And we adore the last draughts of thy Quill: Though those thy thoughts, which the now queasie age, Doth count but clods, and refuse of the stage, Will come up Porcelaine-wit some hundreds hence, When there will be more manners, and more sense; Twas judgement yet to yeeld, and we afford Thy silence as much fame, as once thy word: Who like an aged oake, the leaves being gone, Wast food before, art now religion; Thought still more rich, though not so richly stor’d,

198 BEN JONSON

View’d and enjoy’d before, but now ador’d. Great soule of numbers, whom we want and boast; Like curing gold, most valu’d now th’ art lost; When we shall feed on refuse offalls, when We shall from corne to akornes turne agen; Then shall we see that these two names are one, JOHNSON and Poetry, which now are gone. (34–9 (really 42–7)) (j) Owen Felltham, ‘To the Memory of immortall BEN’.

For Felltham, see No. 36(d), above. To write is easie; but to write of thee Truth: will be thought to forfeit modesty. So farre beyond conceipt, thy strengths appeare; That almost all will doubt, what all must heare. For, when the World shall know, that Pindar’s height, Plautus his wit, and Seneca’s grave weight, Horace his matchlesse Nerves, and that high phrase Wherewith great Lucan doth his Readers maze, Shall with such radiant illustration glide, (As if each line to life were property’d) Through all thy Workes; And like a Torrent move, Rowling the Muses to the Court of Jove, Wits generall Tribe, soone intitle thee Heire to Apollo’s ever verdant Tree. And ’twill by all concluded be, the Stage Is widowed now; was bed-rid by thy age. Aswell as Empire, wit his Zenith hath, Nor can the rage of time, or tyrants wrath Encloud so bright a flame: But it will shine In spight of envie, till it grow divine. As when Augustus raign’d, and warre did cease, Romes bravest wits were usher’d in by peace: So in our Halcyon dayes, we have had now Wits, to which, all that after come, must bow. And should the Stage compose her selfe a Crowne Of all those wits, which hitherto sh’as knowne: Though there be many that about her brow Like sparkling stones, might a quick lustre throw: Yet, Shakespeare, Beaumont, Johnson, these three shall Make up the Jem in the point Verticall. And now since JOHNSON’S gone, we well may say, The Stage hath seene her glory and decay. Whose judgement was’t refined it? Or who Gave Lawes, by which hereafter all must goe. But solid JOHNSON? from whose full strong quill, Each line did like a Diamond drop distill, Though hard, yet cleare. Thalia that had skipt

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 199

Before, but like a Maygame girle, now stript Of all her Mimick Jigges, became a sight With mirth, to show each pleas’d spectators light. And in such gracefull measures, did discover Her beauties now; that every eye turn’d Lover. Who is’t shall make with great Sejanus fall, Not the Stage crack, but th’Universe and all? Wild Catilines sterne fire, who now shall show? Or quench’t with milke, still’d downe by Cicero? Where shall old Authors in such words be showne, As vex their Ghosts, that they are not their owne? Admit his Muse was slow. ’Tis Judgements Fate To move, like greatest Princes, still in state. Those Planets placed in the higher Sphasres, End not their motion but in many yeares, Whereas light Venus and the giddy Moone, In one or some few dayes their courses run. Slow are substantiall bodies: But to things That ayery are; has Nature added wings. Each triviall Poet that can chant a Rime, May chatter out his owne wits Funerall chime: And those slight nothings that so soone are made, Like Mushromes, may together live and fade. The Boy may make a Squib: But every line Must be considered, where men spring a mine. And to write things that Time can never staine, Will require sweat, and rubbing of the braine. Such were those things he left. For some may be Eccentrick, yet with Axiomes maine agree. This Ile presume to say. When Time has made Slaughter of Kings that in the World have sway’d: A greener Bayes shall Crowne BEN. JOHNSONS Name, Then shall be wreath’d about their Regall Fame. For Numbers reach to Infinite. But He Of whom I write this, has prevented me, And boldly said so much in his owne praise, No other pen need any Trophie raise. (42–4 (really 50–2)) (k) Shackerley Marmion, ‘A Funerall sacrifice, to the sacred memory of his thrice honoured father BEN JOHNSON’.

Shackerley Marmion (1603–39), gentleman and dramatist, wrote Hollands Leaguer (1632), A Fine Companion (1633), The Antiquary (performed in or before 1636, published 1641), and a poem, The Legend of Cupid and Psyche (1637). Marmion had moved in the Jonson circle, as a speech in A Fine Companion shows: in Act II, Scene v, the character Carelesse returns drunk and ‘full/Of Oracles’ from ‘Apollo’, the Apollo Room at ‘The Devil and St. Dunstan’ tavern in Fleet Street, ‘where the

200 BEN JONSON

boone Delphicke God, /Drinkes sacke, and keepes his Bacchanalias, /And has his incense, and his Altars smoaking, / And speakes in sparkeling prophesies’ (Sig. D3v). Marmion joined Sir John Suckling’s troop for service in the First Bishops’ War in 1639, but was taken ill early in 1639 and returned to die in London soon after. I cannot grave, nor carve, else would I give Thee S[t]atues, Sculptures, and thy name should live In Tombes, and brasse, untill the stones, or rust Of thine owne Monument, mixe with thy dust: But Nature has afforded me a slight And easie Muse, yet one that takes her flight Above the vulgar pitch. BEN she was thine, Made by adoption free and genuine. By vertue of thy Charter, which from Heaven, By Jove himselfe, before the birth was given. The Sisters Nine this secret did declare, Who of Joves counsell, and His daughters are. These from Parnassus hill came running downe, And though an Infant did with Laurels crowne. Thrice they him kist, and took him in their armes, And dancing round, incircled him him with charmes. Pallas her Virgin breast did thrice distill Into his lips, and him with Nectar fill. When he grew up to yeeres, his mind was all On Verses: Verses, that the Rocks might call To follow him, and Hell it selfe command, And wrest Joves three-fold thunder from his hand. The Satires oft times hem’d him in a ring, And gave him pipes and reeds to heare him sing: Whose vocall notes, tun’d to Apolloes Lyre The Syrens, and the Muses did admire. The Nymphs to him their gemmes and corall sent; And did with Swannes, and Nightingales present Gifts farre beneath his worth. The golden Ore, That lyes on Tagus or Pactolus shore, Might not compare with him, nor that pure sand The Indians find upon Hydaspes Strand. His fruitfull raptures shall grow up to seed. And as the Ocean does the Rivers feed, So shall his wits rich veines, the World supply With unexhausted wealth, and ne’re be dry. For whether He, like a fine thread does file His terser Poems in a Comick stile, Or treates of tragick furies, and him list, To draw his lines out with a stronger twist: Minervas, nor Arachnes loome can show

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 201

Such curious tracts; nor does the Spring bestow Such glories on the Field, or Flora’s Bowers, As His works smile with Figures, and with Flowrs. Never did so much strength, or such a spell Of art, and eloquence of papers dwell. For whil’st that he in colours, full and true, Mens natures, fancies, and their humours drew In method, order, matter, sence and grace, Fitting each person to his time and place; Knowing to move, to slacke, or to make haste, Binding the middle with the first and last: He fram’d all minds, and did all passions stirre, And with a bridle guide the Theater. To say now He is dead, or to maintaine A Paradox he lives, were labour vaine: Earth must to earth. But His faire soule does weare Bright Ariadnes Crowne. Or is plac’d neere, Where Orpheus Harpe turnes round with Lædas Swan: Astrologers, demonstrate where you can, Where His Star shines, and what part of the Skie, Holds His compendious Divinity, There He is fixt, I know it, ’cause from thence, My selfe have lately receiv’d influence. The Reader smiles; but let no man deride The Embleme of my love, not of my pride. (47–9 (really 55–7)) (l) Richard West, ‘On Mr. BEN. JOHNSON’.

West (1614–90) was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford; he graduated BA in 1636, MA in 1639, was made DD in 1660, and became Canon of Wells in 1664. Poet of Princes, Prince of Poets (wee If to Apollo well may pray, to thee.) Give Glo-wormes leave to peepe, who till thy Night Could not be scene, we darkened were with light. For Starres t’appeare after the fall o’th’ Sun, Is at the least modest presumption. I’ve scene a great Lamp lighted by the small Sparke of a Flint, found in a Field or Wall. Our thinner verse faintly may shaddow forth A dull reflexion of thy glorious worth; And (like a Statue homely fashion’d) raise Some Trophies to thy Mem’rie, though not Praise. Those shallow Sirs, who want sharpe sight to look On the Majestique splendour of thy Booke. That rather choose to heare an Archy’s prate,

202 BEN JONSON

Then the full sence of a learn’d Laureate, May when they see thy Name thus plainly writ, Admire the solemne measures of thy wit, And like thy Workes beyond a gawdy Showe Of Boards and Canvas, wrought by INIGO. Plough-men who puzzled are with Figures, come By Tallies to the reckning of a Summe. And Milk-sop Heires, which from their Mothers Lappe Scarce travaild, know farre Countries by a Mappe. Shakespeare may make griefe merry, Beaumonts stile Ravish and melt anger into a smile; In winter nights, or after meales they be, I must confesse very good companie: But thou exact’st our best houres Industrie; Wee may read them; we ought to studie thee: Thy Scænes are precepts, every verse doth give Counsell, and teach us not to laugh, but live. You that with towring thoughts presume so high, (Sweld with a vaine ambitious Timpanie) To dreame on scepters, whose brave mischiefe cals The blood of Kings to their last Funeralls: Learne from Sejanus his high fall, to prove To thy dread Soveraigne a sacred love, Let him suggest a reverend feare to thee, And may his Tragedy, Thy Lecture bee. Learne the compendious Age of slippery Power That’s built on blood; and may one little houre Teach thy bold rashnesse that it is not safe To build a Kingdome on a Cæsars grave. Thy Playes were whipt and libel’d, only ’cause Th’are good, and savour of our Kingdomes Lawes; HISTRIO-MASTIX (lightning like) doth wound Those things alone that solid are and sound. Thus guiltie Men hate justice; so a glasse Is sometimes broke for shewing a foule Face. There’s none that wish Thee Rods instead of Bayes, But such, whose very hate adds to thy Praise. Let Scriblers (that write Post, and versifie With no more leasure then wee cast a Die) Spurre on their Pegasus, and proudly crie, This Verse I made ith’ twinckling of an eye. Thou couldst have done so, hadst thou thought it fit; But ’twas the wisedome of thy Muse to sit And weigh each syllable; suffering nought to passe But what could be no better then it was. Those that keepe pompous State nere goe in hast; Thou went’st before them all, though not so fast. While their poore Cobweb-stuffe finds as quick Fate

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 203

As Birth, and sells like Almanacks out of date; The marble Glory of thy labour’d Rhime Shall live beyond the Calendar of Time. Who will their Meteors ’bove thy Sun advance? Thine are the Works of judgement, theirs of chance. How this whole Kingdome’s in thy debt! wee have From others Perewigs and Paints, to save Our ruin’d Sculls and Faces; but to Thee We owe our Tongues, and Fancies remedie. Thy Poems make us Poets; wee may lacke (Reading thy BOOKE) stolne sentences and Sack. Hee that can but one speech of thine reherse, Whether hee will or no, must make a Verse. Thus Trees give fruit, the kernels of that Fruit, Doe bring forth Trees, which in more branches shoot. Our canting ENGLISH (of it selfe alone) (I had almost said a Confusion) Is now all harmony; what we did say Before was tuning only, this is Play. Strangers, who cannot reach thy sense, will throng To heare us speake the Accents of thy Tongue As unto Birds that sing, if’t be so good When heard alone, what is’t when understood! Thou shall be read as Classick Authors; and As Greeke and Latine taught in every Land. The cringing Mounsieur shall thy Language vent, When he would melt his Wench with Complement. Using thy Phrases he may have his wish Of a coy Nun, without an angry Pish. And yet in all thy POEMS there is showne Such Chastitie, that every Line’s a Zone. Rome will confesse that thou makst Cæsar talke In greater state and pompe then he could walke. Catilines tongue is the true edge of swords, We now not onely heare, but feele his words. Who Tully in thy Idiome understands Will sweare that his Orations are commands. But that which could with richer Language dresse The highest sense, cannot thy Worth expresse. Had I thy owne Invention (which affords ‘Words above Action, matter above words’) To crowne thy Merits, I should only bee Sumptuously poore, low in Hyperbole. (55–8 (really 63–6)) (m) Robert Meade, ‘Our Bayes (me thinks) are withered…’.

204 BEN JONSON

Meade (1616–53) graduated BA at Oxford in 1638 and MA in 1641. While at Westminster School, he wrote a commendatory verse to his schoolfellow Abraham Cowley’s Poeticall Blossoms (1633); his comedy, The Combat of Love and Friendship, was printed in 1654. He was a captain in the Royalist army in 1640, and became an MD in 1646. Our Bayes (me thinks) are withered, and they looke As if (though thunder-free) with envy, strooke; While the triumphant Cipresse boast to be Design’d, as fitter for thy companie. Where shall we now find one dares boldly write, Free from base flattery yet as void of spight? That grovels not in’s Satyres, but soares high, Strikes at the mounting vices, can descry With his quicke Eagles Pen those glorious crimes, That either dazle, or affright the Times? Thy strength of Judgement oft did thwart the tide O’th’ foaming multitude, when to their side Throng’d plush, and silken censures, whilst it chose, (As that which could distinguish Men from cloathes, Faction from judgement) still to keepe thy Bayes From the suspition of a vulgar praise. But why wrong I thy memory whilst I strive, In such a Verse as mine to keep’t alive? Well wee may toyle, and shew our wits the racke; Torture our needy fancies, yet still lacke Worthy Expressions Thy great losse to moane, Being none can fully praise thee but thy owne. (59 (really 67)) (n) Henry Ramsay, ‘UPON THE DEATH OF BENJAMIN JOHNSON’.

Ramsay graduated BA at Oxford in 1639. Line 1 alludes to the opening of Catiline, lines 17–18 to Bartholomew Fair, Act V, Scene v. Let thine owne Sylla (BEN) arise, and trye To teach my thoughts an angry Extasie; That I may fright Contempt, and with just darts Of fury sticke thy Palsey in their Hearts: But why doe I rescue thy Name from those That only cast away their eares in Prose: Or, if some better Braine arrive so high, To venture Rhimes, ’tis but Court-Balladry, Singing thy death in such an uncouth Tone, As it had beene an Execution. What are his faul[t]s (O Envy!) that you speake English at Court, the learned Stage acts Greeke? That Latine Hee reduc’d, and could command

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 205

That which your Shakespeare scarce could understand? That Hee expos’d you Zelots, to make knowne Your Prophanation; and not his owne? That One of such a fervent Nose, should be Pos’d by a Puppet in DIVINITIE? Fame write ’em on his Tombe, and let him have Their Accusations for an Epitaph: Nor thinke it strange if such thy Scænes defie, That erect Scaffolds ’gainst Authoritie. Who now will plot to cozen Vice, and tell The Tricke and Policie of doing well? Others may please the Stage, His sacred Fire Wise men did rather worship then admire: His lines did relish mirth, but so severe; That as they tickled, they did wound the Eare. Well then, such Vertue cannot die, though Stones Loaded with Epitaphs doe presse his Bones: Hee lives to mee; spite of this Martyrdome: BEN, is the selfe same POET in the Tombe. You that can Aldermen new Wits create, Know, JOHNSONS Sceleton is Laureate. (60–1 (really 68–9)) (o) William Bew, ‘Epitaph on Ben Jonson’ (‘Epitaphium in BEN: IONSON’). Translated.

Bew (d. 1705) was made a Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1637, graduated BA in 1639, MA in 1644. He served as a cavalry major in the Swedish army in the Commonwealth period, and was made Bishop of Llandaff in 1679. Stand still, stranger: it is worth the delay to learn what is buried under this tomb. The darling of Comedy; the glory of Tragedy; the pomp of the stage; the heart and head of the theatre; the venerable devourer of languages; a perpetual supply of charms and graces; a running fount of pungent but innocent wit; a radiant bèam of art; a brilliant star; a pumice-stone of judgement, a deep well of learning (but clear and bright as well as deep); the genius of writers; the poetic leader, O how great a thing lies hidden under a small rigid stone! (71) NOTE • [Marginal note] In his Maskes.

206

50. George Daniel, elegy on Jonson 1638

‘To the Memorie of the Best Dramaticke English Poet Ben: Jonson: 1.6.3.8’. From British Library Add. MS 19255. Daniel (1616–57), of Beswick, Yorkshire, wrote two long historical poems and occasional and amorous verse, preserved in a manuscript collection dated 1646 and now in the British Library. He was a stout defender of modern English poets, especially Sidney, Spenser, and Jonson: ‘these justly we may call/Fathers’, he says in ‘An Essay; Endevouring to ennoble our English Poesie…’ (MS, fol. 31r). In ‘A Vindication of Poesie’ he calls Jonson the rival of Rome, ‘unenvied (’cause unequall’d) Laureate’, and ‘of English Drammatickes, the Prince’ (fol. 13r). There is also a short poem ‘Upon Ben Jonsons Booke’ in the collection, declaring that Jonson is not dead but lives in print (fol. 25v). The poems have been printed in The Selected Poems of George Daniel of Beswick 1616–57, ed. Thomas B.Stroup (Lexington, Ky 1959). Great Flame, of English Poets gon; how shall Wee, strew our flowers, at thy Funerall? What obsequies performe; what rites prepare Unto thy Herse? what monument, but were Too narrow to Containe Thee? or what State But were beneath, the honour, of thy fate? Noe rather; wee (remaining of the Tribe Sad orphans) can but wish, what wee ascribe Unto thy Merit; all wee bring, to thee, Is but our Tears; our filial Pietie; Great Lord of Arts! and Father of the Age The first, and best Informer, of the Stage! How? shall wee speake, of him? what Numbers bring T’empassionate? and worthy Orgies Sing? What? Shall wee Say? Shall wee in a Just Zeale Rebuke the Age, of Ignoran[c]e, and tell Aloud his merits? shall wee weepe, or boast, His worth? or Losse? shall wee say, when wee lost Him, a sad Night, of follie, did orespread This Iland, as wee see; and wee, are dead

208 BEN JONSON

Rather, then Hee, wee weep for? for Hee, still Lives, to instruct, the Age, with a Strong Quill; And as he did, from Ignorance, reduce Th’ abused Stage; Soe has he left to us (Who act upon this greater Theatre) Grave morall Pandects; Strong, & yet soe Cleare Hee is, his owne Expositor; and wee (Iff sottishly not blind or worse) may see Vertue, in Act; and everie gracefull Step She treads may be our Path; but wee all Sleepe Uncapable, of what Hee taught; or how To valew, what Hee left us; I could bow (And would the Age, might doo’t without offence) To name him, with a Modest Reverence; For Shall wee kneele, to Titles? and observe Formalities? to those, who nought deserve (More then their name, or painted outside give) And shall my Lord, have a prerogative For vertue, in his Ancestors? (though hee Perhaps the Shame, of all his Pedigree;) And our Great Lord of witt; where vertue in Her Sphere, did move; where Art, and Judgment Shine, Inseparable; bee, with Common Men And vulgar Mention named? oh! the Pen Of Witt, and Truth forbid it: rather let The worthles present Age, his Name forget; For wee are Emulous fooles; and will admitt Noe Rivalls, in the Claime, wee lay, to witt; But After-Ages, (more Judicious Unswaied by Passion, only Sedulous To honour vertue) shall, (I will not doubt) Advance his name; when the despised Rout (His Scorne) shall perish; in the filthy Smoake Of their owne Follies; then all Eyes, shall looke With Joy, and Admiration, to receive A Light, their Fathers could not; I will leave Only this little: Judgment, shall Allow (When Men, have Eyes, to see; & witt, to know Who merit most) the greatest Eulogie For Language, Art, and all Dexteritie Of Witt; to Him; and happ’lie were the flame Extinct, wee might recover’t in his name: A Charme soe stronge: Who ever shall reherse Ben: Jonson; cannot chuse but make a verse; (fols. 24v–25v)

51. John Benson, dedication of Jonson’s Poems 1640

In the quarto edition of the 1640 Poems, titled Ben Jonson’s Execration against Vulcan. With divers Epigrams by the same Author to severall Noble Personages in this Kingdome. There was a similar dedication in Benson’s duodecimo edition of Jonson poems, published the same year (see No. 52, below); it omits the references to Jonson’s works transcending ordinary imagination, and to the pyramids to his name they raise. My Lord: The assurance the Author of these Poems received of his Worth from your Honour, in his lifetime, was not rather a marke of his desert, than a perfect demonstration of your Noble love to him: Which consideration, has rais’d my bold desire to assume presumption, to present these to your Honour, in the person of one deceased; the forme whereof somewhat disperst, yet carry with them the Prerogative of truth to be Mr Ben: Jonsons; and will so appeare to all, whose Eyes, and Spirits are rightly plac’d. You are (my Lord) a Person who is able to give value and true esteeme to things of themselves no lesse deserving: such were his, strong, and as farre transcendent ordinary imagination, as they are conformable to the sence of such who are of sound judgement: his Strenuous Lines, and sinewey Labours have rais’d such Piramydes to his lasting name, as shall out-last Time. And that these may, without any diminution to the glory of his greater Workes, enjoy the possession of publicke favour, (by your Honours permission) I shall be glad by this small Testimony account it a fit opportunity to assure your Honour, my Lord, that I am Your most humble and affectionate Servant, JOHN BENSON. (Sig. A3r–[A4]r)

210

52. On Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica 1640

From the prefatory material to Q.Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry. Englished by Ben: Jonson. With other Workes of the Author, never Printed before, published like No. 51 by John Benson. Lord Herbert’s epigram on the translation (see No. 14, above) appeared in this volume. (a) ‘BARTON HOLYDAY, to BEN JONSON. EPODE’. Barton Holiday (1593–1661) became Archdeacon of Oxford in 1626. His translation of Persius was published in 1616, again in 1617 and 1635; in the posthumous 1673 folio edition, a translation of Juvenal is added, with preface and notes including references to Jonson as the source of several of the manuscripts he had used for his volume; he calls Jonson ‘My dear friend, the Patriarch of our Poets’ (Sig. a2v). Holiday had also written a comedy, T∊ ν γᵕα, or the Marriages of the Arts (1618), which was performed before the king in 1621. Tis dangerous to praise; besides the taske, Which to do’t well, will aske An age of time and judgement; who can then Be prais’d, and by what pen? Yet, I know both, whilst thee I safely chuse My subject, and my Muse. For sure, henceforth our Poets shall implore Thy aid, which lends them more, Then can their tyr’d Apollo, or the nine She wits, or mighty wine. These Deities are banquerupts, and must be Glad to beg art of thee. Some they might once perchance on thee bestow: But, now, to thee they owe: Who dost in daily bounty more wit spend, Then they could ever lend. Thus thou, didst build the globe, which, but for thee, Should want its Axle-tree: And, like a carefull founder, thou dost now

212 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Leave Rules for ever, how To keep’t in reparations, which will doe More good, than to build two. It was an able stock, thou gav’st before: Yet, loe, a richer store! Which doth, by a prevention, make us quit With a deare yeare of wit: Come when it will, by this thy name shall last Untill Fames utmost blast. Thou art a wealthy Epigram, which spends Most vigour when it ends. This ful Epiphonema of thy best Wit, out-speaks all the rest. Me thinkes, I see our after Nephewes gaze, And all their time to praise Is taken up in wonder; whilst they see Ages of wit, in thee Collected, and well judg’d: Charons stout heart Feeles thy new power of Art, And, his obedient armes labour amaine, Whilst he wafts back againe What Poets shadow, thou dost please to call To this thy judgement hall: Whiles, at these frightning Sessions, thou dost sit, The searching Judge of wit, O how the Ghosts do shuffle one behind Another, lest thou find Them, and their errours: but, in vaine, they flie Thy persecuting eye. Bold Aristophanes, shrewd whorson, now More feares thy threatning brow, Then his owne guilt of libelling, and prayes He may new write his playes. Plautus so quakes, that he had rather still Grind on in his old mill. Terence would borrow his owne Eunuchs shape, By the disguise to scape. The Greek Tragœdians droop, as if they plaid The persons whom they made: Fearing thou’lt bid them adde with more expence Of braine, wit to their sence: Or whilst their murdered wits thou maist contemne, Write Tragœdies of them. Seneca, would with Hercules be glad To scape, by running mad: Or at the least, he feares as lesse a hurt, To weare his burning shirt. They’d all take care, and if thy Flaccus too

BEN JONSON 213

Writ now, he’d write all new. Yet all at once confesse Flaccus doe’s well, But thou makst him excell. The Morning Sunne viewing a silver stream, So guilds it with his beame. Master of Art, and Fame! who here makst knowne To all, how all thine owne Well-bodied works were fram’d, whilst here we see Their fine Anatomee. Each nerve and vaine of Art, each slender string, Thou to our eye dost bring: Thus, what thou didst before so well collect, Thou dost as well dissect. For which skill, Poems now thy censure wait, And thence receive their Fate. Thou needst not seek for them, to thee they’re brought, And so held good, or nought. Thus, doth the eye disdaine, with an extreame Scorne to send forth a beame: But scaly formes from the glad object flow By which the eye doth know Its subtle image: thus the eye keeps state, Thus doth the object wait. But here, at this, perchance some one stands by, And drawes his mouth awry; As if his mouth (his mouth he doth so teare) Would whisper in his eare; When thy soft pitty, if it see his spight, But saies, set your mouth right. Yet in mild truth, this worke hath some defect, As now I dare object: Thou err’st against a workmans rarest part, Which is to hide his Art. Next, all thy rules fall short, since none can teach A verse, thy worth to reach. For which, Ile now judge thee: know thy estate Of wit must beare this fate: Till Jonson teach some Muse a straine yet new, Jonson shall want his due. (Sig. [A7]v–[A9]v) (b) Zouch Townley, ‘To Mr Jonson’.

Townley was a friend of Jonson’s, as the examination of Jonson by the AttorneyGeneral in 1628 on the subject of some verses addressed to Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham, shows: Jonson says that he had given Townley a dagger which the latter had admired, while Townley’s guest at a supper (H & S, i, 242–4). Townley defended Jonson against Gill’s attack on The Magnetic Lady, in a poem in Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 38, printed in H & S, xi,

214 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Ben: the world is much in debt and though it may Some petty reck’nings to small Poets pay: Pardon if at thy glorious summe they stick, Being too large for their Arithmeticke. If they could prize the Genius of a Scene, The learned sweat that makes a language cleane, Or understand the faith of ancient skill, Drawn from the Tragick, Comick, Lyrick quill: The Greek and Roman denison’d by thee, And both made richer in thy Poetry. This they may know, and knowing this still grudge: That yet they are not fit of thee to judge. I prophesie more strength to after time, Whose joy shall call this Isle the Poets Clime, Because ’twas thine, and unto thee returne The borrowed flames, with which thy Muse shal burn. Then when the stocke of others Fame is spent, Thy Poetry shall keep its owne old rent. (Sig. [A10]r)

53. James Shirley on Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson 1642

‘Prologue at the Black-Fryers’ to Shirley’s The Sisters, A Comedie, first printed in Six New Playes (1653). The play was performed by the King’s men, apparently in the spring of 1642, the last of Shirley’s plays to open at the Blackfriars Theatre before the Civil War (Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford 1941–68), v, 1148). A version of the poem appears as ‘Prologue to his Tragedy call’d the Cardinall’ in Shirley’s Poems (1646), with eight lines added (pp. 158–9). For Shirley, see No. 46, above. [The prologue laments that the town is empty and the playhouses neglected.] And if you leave us too, we cannot thrive, I’l promise neither Play nor Poet live Till ye come back, think what you do, you see What audience we have, what Company ‘To Shakespear comes, whose mirth did once beguile ‘Dull hours, and buskind, made even sorrow smile, ‘So lovely were the Wounds, that men would say ‘They could endure the bleeding a whole day: He has but few friends lately, think o’that, Hee’l come no more, and others have his fate. ‘Fletcher the Muses darling, and choice love ‘Of Phœbus, the delight of every Grove; ‘Upon whose head the Laurel grew, whose wit ‘Was the Times wonder, and example yet, ’Tis within memory, Trees did not throng, As once the Story said to Orpheus song. ‘Jonson, t’whose name, wise Art did bow, and Wit ‘Is only justified by honouring it: ‘To hear whose touch, how would the learned Quire ‘With silence stoop? and when he took his Lyre, ‘Apollo dropt his Lute, asham’d to see ‘A Rival to the God of Harmonie.

216 BEN JONSON

You do forsake him too, we must deplore This fate, for we do know it by our door. How must this Author fear then, with his guilt Of weakness to thrive here, where late was spilt The Muses own blood, if being but a few, You not conspire, and meet more frequent too? There are not now nine Muses, and you may Be kind to ours, if not, he bad me say, Though while you careless kill the rest, and laugh, Yet he may live to write your Epitaph. (ll. 15–47; Sig. A3r-v)

54. William Cartwright on Jonson’s love-scenes 1647

Commendatory poem to Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647). Part of the second of two poems by Cartwright prefixed to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, and titled ‘Upon the report of the printing of the Dramaticall Poems of Master John Fletcher, collected before, and now set forth in one Volume’. The first of the poems comments that Fletcher steered his muse ‘Twixt Johnsons grave, and Shakespeares lighter sound’ (Sig. [d2]r). For Cartwright, see No. 49(i), above. ⋆⋆⋆ Johnson hath writ things lasting, and divine, Yet his Love-Scenes, Fletcher, compar’d to thine, Are cold and frosty, and exprest love so, As heat with Ice, or warme fires mixt with Snow; Thou, as if struck with the same generous darts, Which burne, and raigne in noble Lovers hearts, Hast cloath’d affections in such native tires, And so describ’d them in their owne true fires; Such moving sighes, such undissembled teares, Such charmes of language, such hopes mixt with feares, Such grants after denialls, such pursuits After despaire, such amorous recruits, That some who sate spectators have confest Themselves transform d to what they saw exprest, And felt such shafts steale through their captiv’d sence, As made them rise Parts, and goe Lovers hence. (ll. 45–60; Sig. [d2]v)

218

55. Robert Herrick, tributes to Jonson 1648

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was the vicar at Dean Prior, in Dorset, when he published some 1,400 of his poems in Hesperides (1648), among them these two tributes to Jonson. (a) ‘Upon M.Ben Johnson. Epig.’. As L.C.Martin notes in his edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (Oxford 1956), p. 532n, ‘Holy-Rage’ here echoes Und., 70, l. 80, ‘Possessed with holy rage’. Robert Burton had previously used the phrase ‘Arch-Poet’ for Jonson, in a marginal note to p. 401 of the 1624 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy. After the rare Arch-Poet JOHNSON dy’d, The Sock grew loathsome, and the Buskins pride, Together with the Stages glory stood Each like a poore and pitied widowhood. The Cirque prophan’d was; and all postures rackt: For men did strut, and stride, and stare, not act. Then temper flew from words; and men did squeake, Looke red, and blow, and bluster, but not speake: No Holy-Rage, or frantick-fires did stirre, Of flash about the spacious Theater. No clap of hands, or shout, or praises-proofe Did crack the Play-house sides, or cleave her roofe. Artlesse the Sceane was; and that monstrous sin Of deep and arrant ignorance came in; Such ignorance as theirs was, who once hist At thy unequal’d Play, the Alchymist: Oh fie upon ’em! Lastly too, all witt In utter darkenes did, and still will sit Sleeping the lucklesse Age out, till that she Her Resurrection ha’s again with Thee. (173) (b) ‘Another’.

Thou had’st the wreath before, now take the Tree;

220 BEN JONSON

That henceforth none be Laurel crown’d but Thee. (170 (really 174))

56. Edmund Gayton, Jonson the scholar’s playwright 1654

From Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot (1654). This commentary on Cervantes’s novel contains a number of references to Jonson’s work; the most elaborate is the aside on Jonson’s response to the failure of one of his plays. As H & S (ix, 241) suggest, the play in question may well have been Catiline, despite Gayton’s reference to a comedy. The lines of Horace quoted as a motto on the title-page of the quarto of the play (translation: ‘Such writing as this gives no pleasure to the rabble; even with the upper class enjoyment has flitted from the ear to the restless eyes and the hollow delights of spectacle’: Epistles, 2.1. 186–8) indicate that the play, like the one Gayton discusses, was condemned by the elite as well as the vulgar. Gayton (1606–66) was a graduate then a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, became a beadle in arts and physics at the university in 1636, lost the post in 1648 and went to debtor’s prison in 1655; after the Restoration he became a beadle again at Oxford, where he died. Both the Authors that compose them, and the Actors that represent them, must be such as they be, for to please the peoples humours.]1 It was an old one, and before this criticall observation said, Populo ut placerent, quas fecisset fabulas.2 Nay in their Amphitheatricall gladiatures, the lives of captives lay at the mercy of the vulgar. & verso pollice vulgi, Quemlibet occidunt populariter.3 And although the only Laureat of our stage (having composed a Play of excellent worth, but not of equall applause) fell downe upon his knees, and gave thanks, that he had transcended the capacity of the vulgar; yet his protestation against their ignorance, was not sufficient to vindicate the misapplication of the argument; for the judicious part of that Auditory condemn’d it equally with those that did not understand it, and although the Comædy wanted not its prodesse, & delectare.4 Had it been exhibited to a scholastick confluence; yet men come not to study at a Playhouse, but love such expressions and passages, which with ease insinuate themselves into their capacities. Lingua,5 that learned Comædy of the contention betwixt the five senses for superiority, is not to be prostituted to the common stage, but is only proper for an Academy; to them bring Jack Drumm’s entertainment, Greens to quoque, the Devill of Edmonton,6 and the like; or if it be on Holydayes, when Saylers, Water-men, Shoomakers, Butchers and Apprentices are at leisure, then it is good policy to amaze those violent spirits, with some

222 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

tearing Tragædy full of fights and skirmishes: As the Guelphs and Guiblins, Greeks and Trojans, or the three London Apprentises,7 which commonly ends in six acts, the spectators frequently mounting the stage, and making a more bloody Catastrophe amongst themselves, then the Players did…. ⋆⋆⋆ All ‘which inconveniences might be redressed, if there were some understanding, and discreet person ordain’d at Court.]8 An Inigo Jones for scenes, and a Ben Johnson for Playes, would have wrought great cures upon the stage, and it was so well reform’d in England, and growne to that height of Language, and gravity of stile, dependency of parts, possibility of plot, compasse of time, and fulnesse of wit, that it was not any where to be equall’d; nor are the contrivers asham’d to permit their playes (as they were acted) to the publick censure, where they stand firme, and are read with as much satisfaction, as when presented on the stage, they were with applause and honour. Indeed their names now may very well be chang’d & call’d the works not Playes of Johnson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cartwright, and the rest, which are survivers of the stage; that having faln, not into Court-Reformers, but more severe correctors, who knowing not how to amend or repaire, have pluckt all downe, and left themselves the only spectacle of their times. (271–3) NOTES 1 From Thomas Sheldon’s translation, Part iv, ch. 21 (The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha (1612), p. 555). In modern editions of the novel the chapter is numbered Part 1, ch. 48. 2 ‘To see that his plays pleased the people’: Terence, The Lady of Andros, Prol., l. 3. 3 ‘And win applause by slaying whomsoever the mob with a turn of the thumb bids them slay’: Juvenal, Satires, 3.36–7. 4 ‘To benefit, and amuse’: adapting Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 333. 5 (1607), attributed to Thomas Tomkis. 6 Marston, Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600); Cooke, Greenes Tu quoque, or, The Cittie Gallant (1611); Dekker, The Witch of Edmonton (1621). 7 Of these three plays, the first has not been identified, the second may be Haywood’s The Iron Age (c. ? 1613), and the third the same writer’s The Four Prentices of London (? 1592): see Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, v, 1345–6, 1456. 8 From Sheldon’s translation, Part iv, ch. 21, p. 559.

57. On reviving Jonson at the Restoration 1660

An anonymous ‘Prologue to the Reviv’d Alchemist’, printed as a broadside sheet. Interesting for its emphasis on the difficulty of acting Jonson at such a remove from the actors Jonson himself directed. A date of 1660 is suggested in Autrey Nell Wiley (ed.), Rare Prologues and Epilogues: 1642–1700 (1940), pp. 13–15. The Alchemist; Fire, breeding Gold, our Theme: Here must no Melancholie be, nor Flegm. Young Ben, not Old, writ this, when in his Prime, Solid in Judgment, and in Wit sublime. The Sisters, who at Thespian Springs their Blood Cool with fresh Streams, All, in a Merry Mood, Their wat’ry Cups, and Pittances declin’d, At Bread-street’s Mer-maid with our Poet din’d: Where, what they Drank, or who plaid most the Rig, Fame modestly conceals: but He grew big Of this pris’d Issue; when a Jovial Maid, His Brows besprinkling with Canarie, said. Pregnant by Us, produce no Mortal Birth; Thy active Soul, quitting the sordid Earth, Shall ’mongst Heav’ns glitt’ring Hieroglyphicks trade, And Pegasus, our winged Sumpter, jade, Who from Parnassus never brought to Greece, Nor Romane Stage, so rare a Master-piece. This Story, true or false, may well be spar’d; The Actors are in question, not the Bard: How they shall humour their oft-varied Parts, To get your Money, Company, and Hearts, Since all Tradition, and like Helps are lost. Reading our Bill new pasted on the Post, Grave Stagers both, one, to the other said, The ALCHEMIST? What! are the Fellows mad? Who shall Doll Common Act? Their tender Tibs Have neither Lungs, nor Confidence, nor Ribs. Who Face, and Subtle? Parts, all Air, and Fire:

224 BEN JONSON

They, whom the Authour did Himself inspire, Taught, Line by Line, each Tittle, Accent, Word, Ne’re reach’d His Height; all after, more absurd, Shadows of fainter Shadows, wheresoe’re A Fox he pencil’d, copied out a Bear. Encouragement for young Beginners small: Yet howsoe’re we’ll venture; have at All. Bold Ignorance (they say) falls seldome short In Camp, the Countrey, City, or the Court. Arm’d with the Influence of your fair Aspects, Our Selves we’ll conquer, and our own Defects, A thousand Eyes dart raies into our Hearts, Would make Stones speak, and Stocks play well their Parts: Some few Malignant Beams we need not fear, Where shines such Glory in so bright a Sphere.

58. Samuel Pepys on performances of Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair 1661

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) kept a diary from January 1661 to May 1669. In it he records both his activities as a busy official (he was Clerk of the Acts, one of the four senior administra- tive posts in the Navy Office) and a private life in which, though brought up a Puritan, he pursued passions for amorous dalliance, for all kinds of conviviality and for the arts, especially music and the theatre. He read Jonson, as well as seeing the plays on stage: he notes that he read The Devil is an Ass as he travelled down to Deptford on 22 July 1663 (Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1970–83), iv, 240), and again that he read Every Man in his Humour one evening in 1667 (No. 66(a), below). He had a copy of the 1692 edition of Jonson’s Works in his library (now no. 2645 in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge). Text from the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary. (a) From the entry for 7 January 1661: on a performance by the King’s Company of Epicoene at the Theatre Royal, Vere Street. Edward Kynaston was well known at this time as a boy actor playing women’s parts, though Davenant’s introduction of actresses at the rival house of the Duke’s Company was soon to end the tradition. Pepys saw Epicoene again at the Vere Street theatre on 25 May: he noted then that it ‘pleased’ him (Diary, ii, 106). To the office; and after that to dinner, where my brother Tom came and dined with me; and after dinner (leaveing 12d with my servants to buy a cake with at night, this day being kept as Twelfeday) Tom and I and my wife to the Theatre and there saw The Silent Woman, the first time that ever I did see it and it is an excellent play. Among other things here, Kinaston the boy hath the good turn to appear in three shapes: 1, as a poor woman in ordinary clothes to please Morose; then in fine clothes as a gallant, and in them was clearly the prettiest woman in the house—and lastly, as a man; and then likewise did appear the handsomest man in the house, (ii, 7) (b) From the entry for 8 June 1661: on a performance of Bartholomew Fair by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Vere Street.

226 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

This is the first record of a performance of the play after the Restoration. The entry in the Diary for 12 November 1661 (see 58(d), below) suggests that the present production omitted the puppet-show in Act V. Pepys saw the play at the Vere Street theatre again on 27 June (Diary, ii, 127). Then to the Cookes with Mr. Sheply and Creed and dined together; and then I went to the Theatre and there saw Bartlemew faire, the first time it was acted nowadays. It is [a] most admirable play and well acted; but too much profane and abusive. (ii, 116–17) (c) From the entry for 7 September 1661: on a performance of Bartholomew Fair by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Vere Street. William Joyce was a tallow chandler, married to a cousin of Pepys’s. So I having appointed the young ladies at the Wardrobe1 to go with them to a play today, I left [William Joyce] and my brother Tom, who came along with him to dine; and my wife and I to them and took them to the Theatre, where we seated ourselfs close by the King and Duke of Yorke and Madam Palmer (which was great content; and endeed, I can never enough admire her beauty); and here was Barthelmew fayre, with the Puppet Shewe, acted today, which had not been these forty years (it being so satyricall against puritanisme, they durst not till now; which is strange they should already dare to do it, and the King to countenance it); but I do never a whit like it the better for the puppets, and rather the worse, (ii, 173–4) (d) From the entry for 12 November 1661: on a performance of Bartholomew Fair by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Vere Street. Sir William Penn was one of the Navy Commissioners. …So abroad with Sir W.Pen, my wife and I, to Barthlemew fayre, with puppets (which I have seen once before, and the play without puppets often); but though I love the play as much as ever I did, yet I do not like the puppets at all, but think it to be a lessening to it. Thence to the Grayhound in Fleetstreete, and there drank some Raspbury Sack and eat some Sasages; and so home very merry, (ii, 212) NOTE 1 The daughters of the Earl of Sandwich, Master of the King’s Great Wardrobe.

59. The Play of the Puritan 1661

From a letter from the Revd William Hooke to the Revd John Davenport in America, 12 October 1661, printed in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, Mass. 1868), 4th series, viii. Hooke is reporting on a performance based on Bartholomew Fair. The version in question was evidently a much altered one; indeed, as Frances Teague, The Curious History of ‘Bartholomew Fair’ (1985), pp. 69–70, suggests, the two Puritans Hooke mentions may well indicate that the piece incorporated parts of The Alchemist; it may well have been titled The Play of the Puritan, judging from Hooke’s form of words. Richard Baxter and Edmund Calamy were leading Puritan divines. The production is referred to again in a letter from Robert Newman to Davenport of 28 October 1661 (Collections, 4th series, viii, 174). This or a similar version of the play was put on again in Dublin in 1670: during the performance, the galleries collapsed, a sign of Providence at work, according to the Presbyterian commentator quoted in Willam Smith Clark, The Early Irish Stage: The Beginnings to 1720 (Oxford 1955), pp. 69–70. This performance is also mentioned by Richard Baxter in Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), Part iii, p. 84. Hooke had settled in New England in 1637, returned to become Cromwell’s domestic chaplain in 1656 (the Protector was a relation of his wife’s), and remained in England after the Restoration. You will heere by the bearer of the play of the Puritan before the Highest, where were present (as they say) the Earl [of] Manchester & 3 Bishops, and London one of them. In it were represented 2 Presbiterians under the forme of Mr. Baxter & Mr. Callamy, whose Habitt & actions were sett forth: prayers were made in imitation of the Puritan, with such scripture expressions as I am loath to mention, the matter such as might have beene used by any godly man in a right maner: The case of Syon lying in the dust was spreade before, &c: & God’s former deliverances of his people urged in such phraises as would amaze yow if yow heard them, with eyes lifted up to heaven, one representing the Puritan put in the stockes for stealing a pigg, & the stockes found by him unlockt, which he admires at as a wonderfull providence & fruite of prayer, upon which he consults about his call, whether he should come forth or not, & at last perceived it was his way, & forth he comes, lifting up his eyes to heaven, & falls to prayse & thankesgiving; I canot tell yow all of it, being large, but such as that some present, who were farr from liking the Puritan, were greatly astonished, wondring the house did not fall upon there heades. The play I heere, was

228 BEN JONSON

taken out of one or two of Ben: Johnson’s, &c: for which Ben would say, that, if he were damn’d, it would be for those 2 playes. I heere it hath beene acted againe. (177–8)

60. Margaret Cavendish on Jonson’s plays 1662

From the prefatory material to her Playes (1662). Margaret Lucas (? 1624–74) was in attendance on Henrietta Maria when she met and married the Earl (afterwards Duke) of Newcastle in Paris in 1645. She was the author of numerous works in verse and prose, including a Life of her husband, published in 1667, which refers to the success of the entertainments for King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria which Newcastle had arranged in 1633 and 1634, and for which he commissioned from Jonson The King’s Entertainment at Welbeck and Love’s Welcome at Bolsover (H & S, x, 703). In a letter the duchess says that ‘in truth I never heard any man Read Well but my Husband, and have heard him say, he never heard any man Read Well but B.J. and yet he hath heard many in his Time’ (CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), pp. 362–3). The folio volume of Playes includes some twenty-one plays and no fewer than ten addresses to readers, as well as a dedication, an ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, a prologue and an ‘Introduction’ in the form of a dialogue. In the first address ‘To the Readers’ the duchess admits her plays are ‘somewhat long... yet, I believe none of my Playes are so long as Ben. Johnson’s Fox, or Alchymist, which in truth, are somewhat too long…’ (Sig. [A32]v). (a) From the second address ‘To the Readers’. [She first defends her practice of not bringing all her characters on stage together at the end of the play.] Likewise my Playes may be Condemned, because they follow not the Ancient Custome, as the learned sayes, which is, that all Comedies should be so ordered and composed, as nothing should be presented therein, but what may be naturally, or usually practiced or Acted in the World in the compass of one day; truly in my opinion those Comedies would be very flat and dull, and neither profitable nor pleasant, that should only present the actions of one day; for though Ben. Johnson as I have heard was of that opinion, that a comedy cannot be good, nor is a natural or true Comedy, if it should present more than one dayes action, yet his Comedies that he hath published, could never be the actions of one day; for could any rational person think that the whole Play of the Fox could be the action of one day or can any rational person think that the Alchymist could be the action of one day? as that so many several Cozenings could be Acted in one day, by Captain Face and Doll Common;

230 BEN JONSON

and could the Alchymist make any believe they could make gold in one day? could they burn so many Coals, and draw the purses of so many, or so often from one person, in one day? and the like is in all his Playes, not any of them presents the actions of one day, although it were a day at the Poles, but of many dayes, nay I may say some years. (Sig. A4r-v) (b) From ‘A General Prologue to all my Playes’.

NOBLE Spectators, do not think to see Such Playes, that’s like Ben. Johnsons Alchymie, Nor Fox, nor Silent Woman: for those Playes Did Crown the Author with exceeding praise, They were his Master-pieces, and were wrought By Wits Invention, and his labouring thought, And his Experience brought Materials store, His reading several Authors brought much more: What length of time he took those Plays to write, I cannot guess, not knowing his Wits flight; But I have heard, Ben Johnsons Playes came forth, To the Worlds view, as things of a great worth; Like Forein Emperors, which do appear Unto their Subjects, not ’bove once a year; So did Ben. Johnsons Playes so rarely pass, As one might think they long a writing was. But my poor Playes, like a common rout, Gathers in throngs, and heedlessly runs out…. ⋆⋆⋆ As for Ben Johnsons brain, it was so strong, He could conceive, or judge, what’s right, what’s wrong: His language plain, significant and free, And in the English Tongue, the Masterie: Yet Gentle Shakespear had a fluent Wit, Although less Learning, yet full well he writ; For all his Playes were writ by Natures light, Which gives his Readers, and Spectators sight. But Noble Readers, do not think my Playes, Are such as have been writ in former daies; As Johnson, Shakespear, Beaumont, Fletcher writ; Mine want their Learning, Reading, Language, Wit: The Latin phrases I could never tell, But Johnson could, which made him write so well…. (ll. 1–18, 43–56; Sig. A7r-v)

61. Thomas Fuller, portrait of Jonson 1662

From The History of the Worthies of England (1662). Fuller (1608–61) was well known as a divine, publishing numerous sermons and The Church History of Britain (1655). The Worthies was published after his death by his son, John Fuller. (a) From the ‘Westminster’ section. BENJAMIN JOHNSON was born in this City. Though I cannot with all my industrious inquiry find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Harts-horn-lane near Charing-cross, where his Mother married a Bricklayer for her Second husband. He was first bred in a private school in Saint Martins Church, then in Westminster school, witness his own Epigram; Camden, most reverend Head, to whom I owe All that I am in Arts, all that I know. How nothing’s that, to whom my Country owes The great renown and Name wherewith she goes, &c. [Epig., 14, ll. 1–4] He was statuably admitted into Saint Johns-colledge in Cambridge, (as many years after incorporated a honorary Member of Christ-church in Oxford) where he continued but few weeks for want of further maintenance, being fain to return to the trade of his father in law. And let not them blush that have, but those who have not a lawful calling. He help’d in the building of the new structure of Lincolns-Inn, when having a Trowell in his hand, he had a book in his pocket. Some gentlemen pitying that his parts should be buried under the rubbish of so mean a Calling, did by their bounty manumise him freely to follow his own ingenuous inclinations. Indeed his parts were not so ready to run of themselves as able to answer the spur, so that it may be truly said of him, that he had an Elaborate wit wrought out by his own industry. He would sit silent in learned company, and suck in (besides wine) their several humors into his observation. What was ore in others, he was able to refine to himself. He was paramount in the Dramatique part of Poetry, and taught the Stage an exact conformity to the laws of Comedians. His comedies were above the Volge, (which are onely tickled with down right obscenity), and took not so well at the first stroke as at the rebound, when beheld the second time; yea, they will endure reading, and that with due commendation, so long as either ingenuity or learning are fashionable in our Nation. If his

232 BEN JONSON

later be not so spriteful and vigorous as his first pieces, all that are old will, and all that desire to be old, should excuse him therein. He was not very happy in his children, and most happy in those which died first, though none lived to survive him. This he bestowed as part of an Epitaph on his eldest son, dying in infancy. Rest in soft peace and Ask’d, say here doth lye, Ben Johnson his best piece of Poetry. [Epig., 45, ll. 9–10] He dyed Anno Domini 1638. And was buried about the Belfry in the Abby-church at Westminster. (243) (b) From the account of Shakespeare in the ‘Warwick-Shire’ section.

He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, Poeta non fit, sed nascitur, one is not made but born a Poet. Indeed his Learning was very little, so that as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any Lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the earth, so nature it self was all the art which was used upon him. Many were the witcombates betwixt him and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion, and an English man of War; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention. (126)

62. Richard Flecknoe, Jonson’s part in the history of the English stage 1664

From ‘A Short Discourse of the English Stage’, appended to Love’s Kingdom. A Pastoral Trage-Comedy (1664). Flecknoe (c. 1620–78) is thought to have been Irish, and a Catholic priest. He published a number of poems; Love’s Kingdom was the only one of his plays to be produced. [Discussing theatrical history after the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and before the Civil War.] In this time were Poets and Actors in their greatest flourish, Johnson, Shakespear, with Beaumont and Fletcher their Poets, and Field and Burbidge their Actors. For Playes, Shakespear was one of the first, who inverted the Dramatick Stile, from dull History to quick Comedy, upon whom Johnson refin’d; as Beaumont and Fletcher first writ in the Heroick way, upon whom Suckling and others endeavoured to refine agen; one saying wittily of his Aglaura, that ’twas full of fine flowers, but they seem’d rather stuck, then growing there; as another of Shakespear’s writings, that ’twas a Fine Garden, but it wanted weeding. There are few of our English Playes (excepting onely some few of Johnsons) without some faults or other; and if the French have fewer then our English, ’tis because they confine themselves to narrower limits, and consequently have less liberty to erre. The chief faults of ours, are our huddling too much matter together, and making them too long and intricate; we imagining we never have intrigue enough, till we lose our selves and Auditors, who shu’d be led in a Maze, but not a Mist; and through turning and winding wayes, but so still, as they may finde their way at last. A good Play shu’d be like a good stuff, closely and evenly wrought, without any breakes, thrums, or loose ends in ’um, or like a good Picture well painted and designed; the Plot or Contrivement, the Design, the Writing, the Coloris, and Counter-plot, the Shaddowings, with other Embellishments: or finally, it shu’d be like a well contriv’d Garden, cast into its Walks and Counterwalks, betwixt an Alley and a Wilderness, neither too plain, nor too confus’d. Of all Arts, that of the Dramatick Poet is the most difficult and most subject to censure; for in all others, they write onely of some particular subject, as the Mathematician of Mathematicks, or Philosopher of Philosophy; but in that, the Poet must write of every thing, and every one undertakes to judge of it.

234 BEN JONSON

A Dramatick Poet is to the Stage as a Pilot to the Ship; and to the Actors, as an Architect to the Builders, or Master to his Schollars: he is to be a good moral Philosopher, but yet more learned in Men then Books. He is to be a wise, as well as a witty Man, and a good man, as well as a good Poet; and I’de allow him to be so far a good fellow too, to take a chearful cup to whet his wits, so he take not so much to dull ’um, and whet ’um quite away. To compare our English Dramatick Poets together (without taxing them) Shakespear excelled in a natural Vein, Fletcher in Wit, and Johnson in Gravity and ponderousness of Style; whose onely fault was, he was too elaborate; and had he mixt less erudition with his Playes, they had been more pleasant and delightful then they are. Comparing him with Shakespear, you shall see the difference betwixt Nature and Art; and with Fletcher, the difference betwixt Wit and Judgement: Wit being an exuberant thing, like Nilus, never more commendable then when it overflowes; but Judgement a stayed and reposed thing, alwayes containing it self within its bounds and limits. (Sig. ar–[a2]r)

63. Samuel Pepys on performances of Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair 1664–5

Text from the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary. (a) From the entry for 1 June 1664: on a performance of Epicoene by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street (the first Drury Lane Theatre). For William Joyce, see No. 58(c), above. Thence to W.Joyces, where by appointment I met my wife (but neither of them at home); and she and I to the King’s House and saw The Silent Woman; but methought not so well done or so good [a] play as I formerly thought it to be, or else I am nowadays out of humour. Before the play was done, it fell such a storm of Hayle that we in the middle of the pit were fain to rise, and all the house in a disorder; and so my wife and I out and got into a little alehouse and stayed there an hour after the play was done before we could get a coach; which at last we did…. (v, 165–6) (b) From the entry for 2 August 1664: on a performance of Bartholomew Fair by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street. Thomas Killigrew was the patentee and manager of the King’s Company. Thence to the King’s play-house and there saw Bartholomew fayre, which doth still please me and is, as it is acted, the best comedy in the world I believe. I chanced to sit by Tom Killigrew —who tells me that he is setting up a Nursery; that is, is going to build a house in Moore fields wherein he will have common plays acted. But four operas it shall have in the year, to act six weeks at a time—where we shall have the best Scenes and Machines, the best Musique, and everything as Magnificent as is in Christendome; and to that end hath sent for voices and painters and other persons from Italy, (v, 230) (c) From the entry for 14 January 1665: on a performance of Volpone by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street. Home to dinner, and thence with my wife to the King’s house, there to see Vulpone, a most excellent play—the best I think I ever saw, and well acted. (vi, 10)

236

64. Saint-Evremond, Jonson central to a French view of English comedy 1666–7

Saint-Evremond, ‘De la comédie angloise’, translated as ‘Of the English Comedy’, in The Works of Mr de St. Evremont. In II Volumes. Translated from the French (1700). René Ternois suggests in his edition of Saint-Evremond’s Oeuvres en Prose (Paris 1962–9), iii, 39, that the essay was probably written in 1666–7. It was not published until 1689, in Saint-Evremond’s Oeuvres Meslées, edited by Claude Barbin. The reference to Shadwell’s Epsom Wells (1672) and the note on Molière must have been added some time after the date of first composition. Saint-Evremond (1644–1703) was exiled permanently from France in 1661 for his attack on Mazarin; he was, neverthe less, reputed to be the best French literary critic of his day (see Quentin M.Hope, Saint-Evremond: the ‘Honnête Homme’ as Critic (Bloomington, Ind. 1962)). Most of his exile was spent in England, but he never, it seems, learned the language. Pierre Desmaizeaux, an early editor of his work, reports that the Duke of Buckingham and M.d’Aubigny explained English plays to him (the passage is quoted in Ternois (ed.), Oeuvres en Prose, iii, 32). Volpone, in particular, made such an impression on him that he wrote a play called Sir Politick would-be, Comédie à la manière des Anglois (published posthumously in Desmaizeaux’s 1705 edition of the Oeuvres Meslées). The play is discussed by Nicole Bonvalet in ‘Une curiosité littéraire: Le Sir Politick Would-Be de Saint-Evremond’, Revue de Littérature Comparée (1980), liv, 80–90. There is no Comedy more conformable to that of the Ancients, than the English, as for what relates to the Manners; it is not a pure piece of Gallantry full of Adventures and amorous Discourses, as in Spain and France; it is a Representation of the ordinary way of living, according to the various Humours, and different Characters of men. It is an Alchymist, who by the Illusions of his Art, feeds the deceitful hopes of a vain Curioso: It is a silly credulous Coxcomb, whose foolish Facility is continually abused; it is sometimes a ridiculous Politician grave and composed, starched in every thing, mysteriously jealousheaded, that thinks to find out hidden designs in the most common Intentions, and to discover Artifice in the most innocent Actions of Life: It is a whimsical Lover, a swaggering Bully, a pedantick Scholar, the one with natural Extravagancies, the other with ridiculous Affectations. The truth is these Cheats and Cullies, these Politicians and other Characters so ingeniously devised, are carried on too far in our Opinion; as those which are to be seen upon our Stage, are a little too faint to the Relish of the English: and the reason of that, perhaps is, because the English think too much, and we commonly think not enough.

238 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Indeed, we are satisfied with the first Images of things; and by sticking to the bare outside, we generally take Appearance for Reality, and the easie and free for what is natural. Upon this Head I shall observe en passant, that these two last Qualities are sometimes most improperly confounded; the Easie and the Natural agree well enough in their Opposition to what is stiff or forced; but when we are to dive into the Nature of things, or the Natural Humour of Persons, it will be granted me, that the Easy will scarce carry us far enough. There is something within us, something hidden, that would discover it self, if we sounded the Subject a little more. (i, 516–17) ⋆⋆⋆ [Saint-Evremond then expands on differences between the English and the French, before returning to his subject.] …[I] must reassume my Subject of Comedy, and observe a considerable difference that is to be found betwixt theirs and ours. It consists in this, that being zealous to copy the Regularity of the Ancients, we still drive to the principal Action, without any other Variety than that of the means that bring us to it. It is not be denied but that the Representation of one principal Event ought to be the sole Scope and End proposed in Tragedy; for we cannot without some Violence and Pain find our selves taken off from what employed our first Thoughts. The Misfortune of an unhappy King, the sad and Tragical Death of a great Hero, wholly confine the mind to these Objects, and all the Variety it cares for, is to know the different means that contributed to bring about this principal Action; but Comedy being made to divert and not to busie us, provided Probability be observed, and Extravagance avoided, Variety in the Opinion of the English is an agreeable Surprize, and Change that pleases; whereas the continual Expectation of one and the same thing, wherein there seems to be no great matter of importance, must of necessity make our Attention flagg. So then instead of representing a signal Cheat carried on by means all relating to the same end, they bring upon the Stage a notable Rogue with several Cheats, each of which produces its proper Effect. As they scarce ever stick to the Unity of Action, that they may represent a principal Person, who diverts them by different Actions: So they often quit that principal Person, to shew what various things happen to several Persons in publick places; Ben Johnson takes this Course in his Bartholomew-Fair. We find the same thing in Epsom-Wells, and in both these Comedies, the ridiculous Adventures of those publick places are comically represented. There are some other Plays which have in a manner two Plots, that are interwoven so ingeniously the one into the other, that the mind of the Spectators (which might be offended by too sensible a Change) finds nothing but Satisfaction in the agreeable Variety they produce. It is to be confessed that Regularity is wanting here; but the English are of Opinion, that the Liberties which are taken for better pleasing, ought to be preferred before exact Rules, which dull Authors make such a pother about, but tire the Audience. Rules are to be observed for avoiding Confusion; good Sence is to be followed for moderating the Flight of a luxuriant Fancy; but Rules must not so constrain the mind, as to fetter it, and a scrupulous Reason ought to be banished, which adhering too strictly to Exactness, leaves nothing free and natural. They who cannot attain a Genius, when Nature hath denied them one, ascribe all to Art which they may acquire, and to set a Value upon the onely Merit they have, which is

BEN JONSON 239

that of being regular, they employ all their Interest to damn any piece that is not altogether so. For those that love the Ridicule, that are pleased to see the Follies of Mankind, that are affected with true Characters, they will find some of the English Comedies as much, or perhaps, more to their relish, than any they have ever seen. Our Moliere whom the Ancients have inspired with the true Spirit of Comedy, equals their Ben Johnson in truly representing the various humours and different ways of men, both observing in their descriptions, the peculiar tast and genius of their own Nation: I believe they have carried that point as far as the Ancients ever did; But it is not to be denied, but that they had a greater regard to their Characters than to the Plot, which might have better laid together and more naturally unravell’d. (i, 518–21)

240

65. Samuel Butler on Jonson and Shakespeare 1667–9

From his ‘Criticismes upon Bookes and Authors’. Text from Hugh de Quehen (ed.), Prose Observations by Samuel Butler (Oxford 1979). Butler (1613–80) had a brief period of fame after the publication of the first part of his verse satire Hudibras (1662) —nine editions were published within a year, one of them a pirate edition—but then returned to his previous obscure employments as secretary to a succession of noble families. At his death he left a considerable body of miscellaneous prose in manuscript, including a number of prose observations; the ‘Criticismes’ belong to the group which were, it seems, composed between 1667 and 1669 (see R.Thyer (ed.), The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose of Mr. Samuel Butler (1759), ii, iv, and de Quehen (ed.), Prose Observations, pp. xxvi, xli–xlvii). In a later note, Butler records that Dryden ‘weighs Poets in the Virtuoso’s Scales that will turne with the hundredth part of a Graine…. He complaynd of B Johnson for stealing 40 Sceanes out of Plautus. —Set a Thief to finde out a Thief’ (Prose Observations, p. 159). The reference seems to be to the ‘Defence of the Epilogue’ to the Second Part of the Conquest of Granada (See. No. 82 (c), below). Men of the quickest apprehensions, and aptest Geniuses to any thing they undertake, do not always prove the greatest Masters in it. For there is more Patience and Flegme required in those that attaine to any Degree of Perfection, then is commonly found in the Temper of active, and ready wits, that soone tire and will not hold out; as the swiftest Race-horse will not perform a longe Jorney so well as a sturdy dull Jade. Hence it is that Virgil who wanted much of that Natural easines of wit that Ovid had, did nevertheless with hard Labour and long Study in the end, arrive at a higher Perfection then the other with all his Dexterity of wit, but less Industry could attaine to. The same we may observe of Johnson, and Shakespeare. For he that is able to thinke long and Judg well wil be sure to finde out better things then another man can hit upon suddenly, though of more quick and ready Parts, which is commonly but chance and the other Art and Judgment. (128)

242

66. Samuel Pepys reads Every Man in his Humour, sees Epicoene 1667

Text from the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary. (a) From the entry for 9 February 1667. To the office, where we sat all the morning, busy. At noon home to dinner and then to my office again, where also busy, very busy, late; and then went home and read a piece of a play (Every Man in his Humour, wherein is the greatest propriety of speech that ever I read in my life); and so to bed. (viii, 50–1) (b) From the entry for 16 April 1667: on a performance of Epicoene by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street. ‘Knip’ is the actress Elizabeth Knepp, with whom Pepys carried on a long association. Mary Mercer had been Mrs Pepys’s companion. Up, and to the office, where sat all the morning; at noon home to dinner; and thence in haste to carry my wife to see the new play I saw yesterday, she not knowing it. But there, contrary to expectation, find The Silent Woman, however, in; and there Knip came into the pit. I took her by me, and here we met with Mrs. Horsly, the pretty woman, an acquaintance of Mercer’s, whose house is burnt. ⋆⋆⋆ I never was more taken with a play then I am with this Silent Woman, as old as it is—and as often as I have seen it. There is more wit in it then goes to ten new plays, (viii, 168–9)

244

67. John Dryden’s Essay 1667

From Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay. Published in August 1667, but dated 1668. There was a second edition in 1684, and a third in 1693. This essay (seventy-two pages, outside of prefatory matter) was Dryden’s longest critical piece, and the only one published separately. It takes the form of a dialogue between Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander, who have taken to the Thames in a barge in early June 1665, to learn the result of a battle between the Dutch and English navies. In the dedication to Charles Sackville (Lord Buckhurst), Dryden presents the Essay as a contribution to the controversy on the use of verse in drama (see No. 71, below); in the dedication to the reader, the Essay is offered as a vindication of English writers against the French, thus contributing to a different controversy, begun with Samuel Sorbière’s attacks on the English drama in his Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre (1664), and continued with Thomas Sprat’s Observations on Monsieur Sorbier’s Voyage into England (1665). On the Sorbière-Sprat background for the Essay, see George Williamson, ‘The Occasion of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, in his Seventeenth Century Contexts (1960), pp. 272–88; and on the Essay in general, see Introduction, pp. 12–13. [Crites is arguing for the superiority of the ancients.] In the mean time I must desire you to take notice, that the greatest man of the last age (Ben. Johnson) was willing to give place to them in all things: He was not onely a professed Imitator of Horace, but a learned Plagiary of all the others; you track him every where in their Snow: If Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal, had their own from him, there are few serious thoughts which are new in him; you will pardon me therefore if I presume he lov’d their fashion when he wore their cloaths. But since I have otherwise a great veneration for him, and you, Eugenius, prefer him above all other Poets, I will use no farther argument to you then his example: I will produce Father Ben. to you, dress’d in all the ornaments and colours of the Ancients, you will need no other guide to our Party if you follow him; and whether you consider the bad Plays of our Age, or regard the good ones of the last, both the best and worst of the Modern Poets will equally instruct you to esteem the Ancients. (14–15) ⋆⋆⋆ [Lisideius is arguing for the superiority of the modern French drama.]

246 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

I have taken notice but of one Tragedy of ours, whose Plot has that uniformity and unity of design in it which I have commended in the French; and that is Rollo, or rather, under the name of Rollo, The Story of Bassianus and Geta in Herodian, there indeed the Plot is neither large nor intricate, but just enough to fill the minds of the Audience not to cloy them. Besides, you see it founded upon the truth of History, onely the time of the action is not reduceable to the strictness of the Rules, and you see in some places a little farce mingled, which is below the dignity of the other parts; and in this all our Poets are extreamly peccant, even Ben. Johnson himself in Sejanus and Catiline has given us this Oleo of a Play; this unnatural mixture of Comedy and Tragedy, which to me sounds just as ridiculously as the History of David with the merry humours of Golia’s.1 In Sejanus you may take notice of the Scene betwixt Livia and the Physician, which is a pleasant Satyre upon the artificial helps of beauty: In Catiline you may see the Parliament of Women; the little envies of them to one another; and all that passes betwixt Curio and Fulvia: Scenes admirable in their kind, but of an ill mingle with the rest. (30–1) ⋆⋆⋆ [Lisideius has quoted Horace (Ars Poetica, ll. 180–7) on the unsuitability of some actions for representation on stage.] That is, those actions which by reason of their cruelty will cause aversion in us, or by reason of their impossibility unbelief, ought either wholly to be avoided by a Poet, or onely deliver’d by narration. To which, we may have leave to add such as to avoid tumult, (as was before hinted) or to reduce the Plot into a more reasonable compass of time, or for defect of Beauty in them, are rather to be related then presented to the eye. Examples of all these kinds are frequent, not onely among all the Ancients, but in the best receiv’d of our English Poets. We find Ben. Johnson using them in his Magnetick Lady, where one comes out from Dinner, and relates the quarrels and disorders of it to save the undecent appearing of them on the Stage, and to abreviate the Story: and this in express imitation of Terence, who had done the same before him in his Eunuch, where Pythias makes the like relation of what had happen’d within at the Souldiers entertainment. The relations likewise of Sejanus’s death, and the prodigies before it are remarkable; the one of which was hid from sight to avoid the horrour and tumult of the representation; the other to shun the introducing of things impossible to be believ’d. (34–5) ⋆⋆⋆ [Neander is defending the modern English against the modern French drama, in reply to Lisideius.] But of late years de Moliere, the Younger Corneille, Quinault, and some others, have been imitating of afar off the quick turns and graces of the English Stage. They have mix’d their serious Playes with mirth, like our Tragicomedies since the death of Cardinal Richlieu, which Lisideius and many others not observing, have commended that in them for a virtue which they themselves no longer practice. Most of their new Playes are like some of ours, deriv’d from the Spanish Novells. There is scarce one of them without a vail, and a trusty Diego, who drolls much after the rate of the Adventures. But their humours, if I may grace them with that name, are so thin sown that never above one of them comes up in any Play: I dare take upon me to find more variety of them in some one Play of Ben. Johnsons then in

BEN JONSON 247

all theirs together: as he who has seen the Alchymist, the silent Woman, or BartholmewFair, cannot but acknowledge with me. (38) ⋆⋆⋆ There is another part of Lisideius his Discourse, in which he has rather excus’d our neighbours then commended them; that is, for aiming onely to make one person considerable in their Playes. ’Tis very true what he has urged, that one character in all Playes, even without the Poets care, will have advantage of all the others; and that the design of the whole Drama will chiefly depend on it. But this hinders not that there may be more shining characters in the Play: many persons of a second magnitude, nay, some so very near, so almost equal to the first, that greatness may be oppos’d to greatness, and all the persons be made considerable, not onely by their quality, but their action. ’Tis evident that the more the persons are, the greater will be the variety of the Plot. If then the parts are manag’d so regularly that the beauty of the whole be kept intire, and that the variety become not a perplex’d and confus’d mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it. And that all this is practicable, I can produce for examples many of our English Playes: as the Maids Tragedy, the Alchymist, the Silent Woman; I was going to have named the Fox, but that the unity of design seems not exactly observ’d in it; for there appears two actions in the Play; the first naturally ending with the fourth Act; the second forc’d from it in the fifth: which yet is the less to be condemn’d in him, because the disguise of Volpone, though it suited not with his character as a crafty or covetous person, agreed well enough with that of a voluptuary: and by it the Poet gain’d the end he aym’d at, the punishment of Vice, and the reward of Virtue, which that disguise produc’d. So that to judge equally of it, it was an excellent fifth Act, but not so naturally proceeding from the former. (41–2) ⋆⋆⋆ But for death, that it ought not to be represented, I have besides the Arguments alledg’d by Lisideius, the authority of Ben. Johnson, who has forborn it in his Tragedies; for both the death of Sejanus and Catiline are related: though in the latter I cannot but observe one irregularity of that great Poet: he has remov’d the Scene in the same Act, from Rome to Catiline’s Army, and from thence again to Rome; and besides, has allow’d a very inconsiderable time, after Catilines Speech, for the striking of the battle, and the return of Petreius, who is to relate the event of it to the Senate: which I should not animadvert upon him, who was otherwise a painful observer of τ πρε•π ν, or the decorum of the Stage, if he had not us’d extream severity in his judgment upon the incomparable Shakespeare for the same fault. (43) ⋆⋆⋆ [Neander asserts the independence of the English drama of the French, and goes on to offer Epicoene as an example of a play as regular as any of the French, and yet with more variety.] For, if you consider the Plots, our own are fuller of variety, if the writing ours are more quick and fuller of spirit: and therefore ’tis a strange mistake in those who decry the way of writing Playes in Verse, as if the English therein imitated the French. We have borrow’d nothing from them; our Plots are weav’d in English Loomes: we endeavour therein to follow the variety and greatness of characters which are deriv’d to us from

248 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Shakespeare and Fletcher: the copiousness and well-knitting of the intrigues we have from Johnson, and for the Verse it self we have English Presidents of elder date then any of Corneille’s Playes: (not to name our old Comedies before Shakespeare, which were all writ in verse of six feet, or Alexandrin’s, such as the French now use) I can show in Shakespeare, many Scenes of rhyme together, and the like in Ben. Johnsons Tragedies: In Catiline and Sejanus sometimes thirty or forty lines; I mean besides the Chorus, or the Monologues, which by the way, show’d Ben. no enemy to this way of writing, especially if you look upon his sad Shepherd which goes sometimes upon rhyme, sometimes upon blanck verse, like an Horse who eases himself upon Trot and Amble. You find him likewise commending Fletcher’s Pastoral of the Faithful Shepherdess; which is for the most part Rhyme, though not refin’d to that purity to which it hath since been brought: And these examples are enough to clear us from a servile imitation of the French. But to return from whence I have digress’d, I dare boldly affirm these two things of the English Drama: First, That we have many Playes of ours as regular as any of theirs; and which, besides, have more variety of Plot and Characters: And secondly, that in most of the irregular Playes of Shakespeare or Fletcher (for Ben. Johnson’s are for the most part regular) there is a more masculine fancy and greater spirit in all the writing, then there is in any of the French. I could produce even in Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s Works, some Playes which are almost exactly form’d; as the Merry Wives of Windsor, and the Scornful Lady: but because (generally speaking) Shakespeare, who writ first, did not perfectly observe the Laws of Comedy, and Fletcher, who came nearer to perfection, yet through carelesness made many faults; I will take the pattern of a perfect Play from Ben. Johnson, who was a careful and learned observer of the Dramatique Lawes, and from all his Comedies I shall select The Silent Woman; of which I will make a short Examen, according to those Rules which the French observe.2 As Neander was beginning to examine the Silent Woman, Eugenius, looking earnestly upon him; I beseech you Neander, said he, gratifie the company and me in particular so far, as before you speak of the Play, to give us a Character of the Authour; and tell us franckly your opinion, whether you do not think all Writers, both French and English, ought to give place to him? I fear, replied Neander, That in obeying your commands I shall draw a little envy upon my self. Besides, in performing them, it will be first necessary to speak somewhat of Shakespeare and Fletcher, his Rivalls in Poesie; and one of them, in my opinion, at least his equal, perhaps his superiour. To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his Comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is alwayes great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of Poets. Quantum lenta solent, inter viberna cupressi.3 The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eaton say, That there was no subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare;

BEN JONSON 249

and however others are now generally prefer’d before him, yet the Age wherein he liv’d, which had contemporaries with him, Fletcher and Johnson never equall’d them to him in their esteem: And in the last Kings Court, when Ben’s reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the Courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him. Beaumont and Fletcher of whom I am next to speak, had with the advantage of Shakespeare’s wit, which was their precedent, great natural gifts, improv’d by study. Beaumont especially being so accurate a judge of Playes, that Ben. Johnson while he liv’d, submitted all his Writings to his Censure, and ’tis thought, us’d his judgement in correcting, if not contriving all his Plots. What value he had for him, appears by the Verses he writ to him; and therefore I need speak no farther of it. The first Play which brought Fletcher and him in esteem was their Philaster: for before that, they had written two or three very unsuccessfully: as the like is reported of Ben. Johnson, before he writ Every Man in his Humour. Their Plots were generally more regular then Shakespeare’s, especially those which were made before Beaumont’s death; and they understood and imitated the conversation of Gentlemen much better; whose wilde debaucheries, and quickness of wit in reparties, no Poet can ever paint as they have done. This Humour of which Ben. Johnson deriv’d from particular persons, they made it not their business to describe: they represented all the passions very lively, but above all, Love. I am apt to believe the English Language in them arriv’d to its highest perfection; what words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous then necessary. Their Playes are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the Stage; two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare’s or Johnsons: the reason is, because there is a certain gayety in their Comedies, and Pathos in their more serious Playes, which suits generally with all mens humours. Shakespeares language is likewise a little obsolete, and Ben. Johnson’s wit comes short of theirs. As for Johnson, to whose Character I am now arriv’d, if we look upon him while he was himself, (for his last Playes were but his dotages) I think him the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theater ever had. He was a most severe Judge of himself as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit and Language, and Humour also in some measure we had before him; but something of Art was wanting to the Drama till he came. He manag’d his strength to more advantage then any who preceded him. You seldome find him making Love in any of his Scenes, or endeavouring to move the Passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an height. Humour was his proper Sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent Mechanick people. He was deeply conversant in the Ancients, both Greek and Latine, and he borrow’d boldly from them: there is scarce a Poet or Historian among the Roman Authours of those times whom he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline. But he has done his Robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any Law. He invades Authours like a Monarch, and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in him. With the spoils of these Writers he so represents old Rome to us, in its Rites, Ceremonies and Customs, that if one of their Poets had written either of his Tragedies, we had seen less of it then in him. If there was any fault in his Language, ’twas that he weav’d it too closely and laboriously in his serious Playes;4 perhaps too, he did a little to much Romanize our Tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latine as he found them: wherein though he learnedly followed the Idiom of their language, he did not enough comply with ours. If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct Poet, but

250 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare. To conclude of him, as he has given us the most correct Playes, so in the precepts which he has laid down in his Discoveries, we have as many and profitable Rules for perfecting the Stage as any wherewith the French can furnish us. Having thus spoken of the Authour, I proceed to the examination of his Comedy, The Silent Woman. Examen of the Silent Woman. To begin first with the length of the Action, it is so far from exceeding the compass of a Natural day, that it takes not up an Artificial one. ’Tis all included in the limits of three hours and an half, which is no more than is requir’d for the presentment on the Stage. A beauty perhaps not much observ’d; if it had, we should not have look’d upon the Spanish Translation of five hours with so much wonder. The Scene of it is laid in London; the latitude of place is almost as little as you can imagine: for it lies all within the compass of two Houses, and after the first Act, in one. The continuity of Scenes is observ’d more than in any of our Playes, excepting his own Fox and Alchymist. They are not broken above twice or thrice at most in the whole Comedy, and in the two best of Corneille’s Playes, the Cid and Cinna, they are interrupted once apiece. The action of the Play is intirely one; the end or aim of which is the setting Morose’s Estate on Dauphine. The Intrigue of it is the greatest and most noble of any pure unmix’d Comedy in any Language: you see in it many persons of various characters and humours, and all delightful: As first, Morose, or an old Man, to whom all noise but his own talking is offensive. Some who would be thought Criticks, say this humour of his is forc’d: but to remove that objection, we may consider him first to be naturally of a delicate hearing, as many are to whom all sharp sounds are unpleasant; and secondly, we may attribute much of it to the peevishness of his Age, or the wayward authority of an old man in his own house, where he may make himself obeyed; and this the Poet seems to allude to in his name Morose. Besides this, I am assur’d from diverse persons, that Ben. Johnson was actually acquainted with such a man, one altogether as ridiculous as he is here represented. Others say it is not enough to find one man of such an humour; it must be common to more, and the more common the more natural. To prove this, they instance in the best of Comical Characters, Falstaff: There are many men resembling him; Old, Fat, Merry, Cowardly, Drunken, Amorous, Vain, and Lying: But to convince these people, I need but tell them, that humour is the ridiculous extravagance of conversation, wherein one man differs from all others. If then it be common, or communicated to many, how differs it from other mens? or what indeed causes it to be ridiculous so much as the singularity of it? As for Falstaffe, he is not properly one humour, but a Miscellany of Humours or Images, drawn from so many several men; that wherein he is singular in his wit, or those things he sayes, præter expectatum, unexpected by the Audience; his quick evasions when you imagine him surpriz’d, which as they are extreamly diverting of themselves, so receive a great addition from his person; for the very sight of such an unwieldy old debauch’d fellow is a Comedy alone. And here having a place so proper for it I cannot but enlarge somewhat upon this subject of humour into which I am fallen. The Ancients had little of it in their Comedies: for the ,5 of the old Comedy, of which Aristophanes was chief, was not so much to imitate a man, as to make the people laugh at some odd conceit, which had commonly somewhat of unnatural or obscene in it. Thus when you see Socrates brought upon the Stage, you are not to imagine him made ridiculous by the imitation of his actions, but rather by making him perform something very unlike himself: something so childish and absurd, as by

BEN JONSON 251

comparing it with the gravity of the true Socrates, makes a ridiculous object for the Spectators. In their new Comedy which succeeded, the Poets sought indeed to express the , as in their Tragedies the of Mankind. But this contain’d onely the general Characters of men and manners: as old men, Lovers, Servingmen, Courtizans, Parasites, and such other persons as we see in their Comedies; all which they made alike: that is, one old man or Father; one Lover, one Courtizan so like another, as if the first of them had begot the rest of every sort; Ex homine hunc natum dicas.6 The same custome they observ’d likewise in their Tragedies. As for the French, though they have the word humeur among them, yet they have small use of it in their Comedies, or Farces; they being but ill imitations of the ridiculum, or that which stirr’d up laughter in the old Comedy. But among the English ’tis otherwise: where by humour is meant some extravagant habit, passion, or affection; particular (as I said before) to some one person: by the oddness of which, he is immediately distinguish’d from the rest of men; which being lively and naturally represented, most frequently begets that malicious pleasure in the Audience which is testified by laughter: as all things which are deviations from common customes are ever the aptest to produce it: though by the way this laughter is onely accidental, as the person represented is Fantastick or Bizarre; but pleasure is essential to it, as the imitation of what is natural. The description of these humours, drawn from the knowledge and observation of particular persons, was the peculiar genius and talent of Ben. Johnson; To whose Play I now return. Besides Morose, there are at least 9 or 10 different Characters and humours in the Silent Woman, all which persons have several concernments of their own, yet are all us’d by the Poet, to the conducting of the main design to perfection. I shall not waste time in commending the writing of this Play, but I will give you my opinion, that there is more wit and acuteness of Fancy in it then in any of Ben. Johnson’s. Besides, that he has here describ’d the conversation of Gentlemen in the persons of True-Wit, and his Friends, with more gayety, ayre and freedom, then in the rest of his Comedies. For the contrivance of the Plot ’tis extream elaborate, and yet withal easie; for the ,7 or untying of it, ’tis so admirable, that when it is done, no one of the Audience would think the Poet could have miss’d it; and yet it was conceald so much before the last Scene, that any other way would sooner have enter’d into your thoughts. But I dare not take upon me to commend the Fabrick of it, because it is altogether so full of Art, that I must unravel every Scene in it to commend it as I ought. And this excellent contrivance is still the more to be admir’d, because ’tis Comedy where the persons are onely of common rank, and their business private, not elevated by passions or high concernments as in serious Playes. Here every one is a proper Judge of all he sees; nothing is represented but that with which he daily converses: so that by consequence all faults lie open to discovery, and few are pardonable. ’Tis this which Horace has judiciously observ’d: Creditor ex medio quia res arcessit habere Sudoris minimum, sed habet Comedia tanto Plus oneris, quanto veniæ minus. —8 But our Poet, who was not ignorant of these difficulties, had prevail’d himself of all advantages; as he who designes a large leap takes his rise from the highest ground. One of these advantages is that which Corneille has laid down as the greatest which can arrive to any Poem, and which he himself could never compass above thrice in all his Playes, viz. the making choice of some signal and long expected day, whereon the action of the Play is to depend. This day was that design’d by Dauphine for the selling of his Uncles Estate upon him; which to compass he contrives to marry him: that the marriage had been plotted by

252 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

him long beforehand is made evident by what he tells Truwit in the second Act, that in one moment he had destroy’d what he had been raising many months. There is another artifice of the poet, which I cannot here omit, because by the frequent practice of it in his Comedies, he has left it to us almost as a Rule, that is, when he has any Character or humour wherein he would show a Coup de Maistre, or his highest skill; he recommends it to your observation by a pleasant description of it before the person first appears. Thus, in Bartholomew Fair he gives you the Pictures of Numps and Cokes, and in this those of Daw, Lafoole, Morose, and the Collegiate Ladies; all which you hear describ’d before you see them. So that before they come upon the Stage you have a longing expectation of them, which prepares you to receive them favourably; and when they are there, even from their first appearance you are so far acquainted with them, that nothing of their humour is lost to you. I will observe yet one thing further of this admirable Plot; the business of it rises in every Act. The second is greater then the first; the third then the second, and so forward to the fifth. There too you see, till the very last Scene, new difficulties arising to obstruct the action of the Play; and when the Audience is brought into despair that the business can naturally be effected, then, and not before, the discovery is made. But that the Poet might entertain you with more variety all this while, he reserves some new Characters to show you, which he opens not till the second and third Act. In the second, Morose, Daw, the Barber and Otter, in the third the Collegiat Ladies: All which he moves afterwards in bywalks, or under-Plots, as diversions to the main design, least it should grow tedious, though they are still naturally joyn’d with it, and somewhere or other subservient to it. Thus, like a skilful Chest-player, by little and little he draws out his men, and makes his pawns of use to his greater persons. If this Comedy, and some others of his, were translated into French Prose (which would now be no wonder to them, since Moliere has lately given them Playes out of Verse which have not displeas’d them) I believe the controversie would soon be decided betwixt the two Nations, even making them the Judges. But we need not call our Hero’s to our ayde; Be it spoken to the honour of the English, our Nation can never want in any Age such who are able to dispute the Empire of Wit with any people in the Universe. And though the fury of a Civil War, and Power, for twenty years together, abandon’d to a barbarous race of men, Enemies of all good Learning, had buried the Muses under the ruines of Monarchy; yet with the restoration of our happiness, we see reviv’d Poesie lifting up its head, & already shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it. We have seen since His Majesties return, many Dramatick Poems which yield not to those of any forreign Nation, and which deserve all Lawrels but the English. (46–56) ⋆⋆⋆ [Crites discusses the idea that rhyme is a necessary check on a luxuriant imagination.] In our own language we see Ben. Johnson confining himself to what ought to be said, even in the liberty of blank Verse; and yet Comeille, the most judicious of the French Poets, is still varying the same sence an hundred wayes, and dwelling eternally upon the same subject, though confin’d by Rhyme. (60) ⋆⋆⋆ [Neander defends rhymed verse in drama.]

BEN JONSON 253

And this, Sir, calls to my remembrance the beginning of your discourse, where you told us we should never find the Audience favourable to this kind of writing, till we could produce as good Playes in Rhyme, as Ben. Johnson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare, had writ out of it. But it is to raise envy to the living, to compare them with the dead. They are honour’d, and almost ador’d by us, as they deserve; neither do I know any so presumptuous of themselves as to contend with them. Yet give me leave to say thus much without injury to their Ashes, that not onely we shall never equal them, but they could never equal themselves, were they to rise and write again. We acknowledge them our Fathers in wit, but they have ruin’d their Estates themselves before they came to their childrens hands. There is scarce an Humour, Character, or any kind of Plot, which they have not blown upon: all comes sullied or wasted to us: and were they to entertain this Age, they could not make so plenteous treatments out of such decay’d Fortunes. This therefore will be a good Argument to us either not to write at all, or to attempt some other way. There is no bayes to be expected in their Walks; Tentanda via est quà me quoque possum tollere humo.9 This way of writing in Verse, they have onely left free to us; our age is arriv’d to a perfection in it, which they never knew; and which (if we may guess by what of theirs we have seen in Verse (as the Faithful Shepherdess, and Sad Shepherd:) ’tis probable they never could have reach’d. For the Genius of every Age is different; and though ours excel in this, I deny not but that to imitate Nature in that perfection which they did in Prose, is greater commendation then to write in verse exactly. (64–5) ⋆⋆⋆ And for your instance of Ben Johnson, who you say, writ exactly without the help of Rhyme; you are to remember ’tis onely an aid to a luxuriant Fancy, which his was not: As he did not want imagination, so none ever said he had much to spare. Neither was verse then refin’d so much to be an help to that Age as it is to ours. Thus then the second thoughts being usually the best, as receiving the maturest digestion from judgment, and the last and most mature product of those thoughts being artful and labour’d verse, it may well be inferr’d, that verse is a great help to a luxuriant Fancy, and this is what that Argument which you oppos’d was to evince. (72) NOTES 1 I.e. Golias, a mythical medieval creator of satirical and licentious verses. 2 In 1660 Corneille had published his Theatre with three Discours (on the usefulness of drama, on tragedy, and on the three unities) and with Examens (brief individual discussions of his plays). See Pierre Corneille, Writings on the Theatre, ed. H.T.Barnwell (Oxford 1965). 3 ‘As cypresses oft do among the bending osiers’: Virgil, Eclogues, 1. 25. 4 Altered in 1684 to ‘in his Comedies especially’. 5 ‘The ridiculous’. 6 ‘You call this one a human being?’: Terence, Eunuch, l. 460. 7 Corrected in 1684 to ‘λ σις’. 8 ’Tis thought that Comedy, drawing its themes from daily, life, calls for less labour; but in truth it carries a heavier burden, as the indulgence allowed is less’: Horace, Epistles, 2.1.168– 70. 9 ‘I must essay a path whereby I, too, may rise from earth’: Virgil, Georgics, 3.8–9.

254

68. John Dryden makes Shakespeare monarch over Fletcher and Jonson 1667

Dryden’s prologue to The Tempest: or The Enchanted Island, adapted by Davenant and himself from Shakespeare’s play; first performed at court in November 1667, and published in 1670. As when a Tree’s cut down the secret root Lives under ground, and thence new Branches shoot So, from old Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day Springs up and buds a new reviving Play. Shakespear, who (taught by none) did first impart To Fletcher Wit, to labouring Johnson Art. He Monarch-like gave those his subjects law, And is that Nature which they paint and draw Fletcher reach’d that which on his heights did grow, Whilst Johnson crept and gather’d all below. This did his Love, and this his Mirth digest: One imitates him most, the other best. If they have since out-writ all other men, ’Tis with the drops which fell from Shakespear’s Pen. The Storm which vanish’d on the Neighb’ring shore, Was taught by Shakespear’s Tempest first to roar. That innocence and beauty which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. But Shakespear’s Magick could not copy’d be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he. I must confess ’twas bold, nor would you now, That liberty to vulgar Wits allow, Which works by Magick supernatural things; But Shakespear’s pow’r is sacred as a King’s. Those Legends from old Priest-hood were receiv’d, And he then writ, as people then believ’d: But, if for Shakespear we your grace implore, We for our Theatre shall want it more Who by our dearth of Youths are forc’d t’employ One of our Women to present a Boy.

256 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

And that’s a transformation you will say Exceeding all the Magick in the Play. Let none expect in the last Act to find, Her Sex transform’d from man to Woman-kind. What e’re she was before the Play began, All you shall see of her is perfect man. Or if your fancy will be farther led, To find her Woman, it must be abed. (Sig. [A4]r)

69. John Dryden, Jonson’s borrowings 1668

‘Prologue to Albumazar’, for a revival of Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, 22 February 1668. Printed in Covent Garden Drollery (1672); this text from the reissue of that work, also published in 1672. There had been earlier accusations of the indebtedness of The Alchemist to Tomkis’s play (see H & S, ii, 96n), but The Alchemist was performed in 1612, before the first performance of Albumazar (1614). Dryden’s lines are valuable none the less for his favourable comparison between Jonson’s borrowings and the far more ruthless plagiaries by authors of Dryden’s own day. To say this Commedy pleas’d long a go, Is not enough, to make it pass you now: Yet gentlemen, your Ancestors had witt, When few men censurd, and fewer writ. And Johnson, of those few, the best chose this, And the best modell of his master piece; Subtle was got by our Albumazar, That Alchemist by this Astrologer. Here he was fashion’d, and I should suppose, He likes my fashion well, that wears my Cloaths. But Ben made nobly his, what he did mould, What was anothere’s Lead, became his Gold; Like an unrighteous Conquerer he raigns, Yet rules that well, which he unjustly gains. But this our age such Authors does afford, As make whole Playes, and yet scarce write a word: Who in this Anarchy of witt, rob all, And what’s their Plunder, their Possession call. Who like bold Padders scorn by night to prey, But Rob Sun-shine in the face of day; Who scarce the common Ceremony use, Of stand, Sir, and deliver up your Muse. But knock the Poet down; and, with a grace, Mount Pegasus before the owners Face. (ll. 1–24; p. 87) ⋆⋆⋆

258

70. Thomas Shadwell on Jonson’s humour comedy 1668

From the preface to Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers (1668). The dedication to the Duke of Newcastle is dated 1 September. The comic dramatist Shadwell (1641–92) succeeded Dryden as poet laureate in 1688. He identified himself as a follower of Jonson throughout his career, as here and in No. 77, below. See Introduction, pp. 15–16. In No. 72(b), below, Pepys reports Shadwell’s admiration for The Silent Woman. The dramatis personae of The Sullen Lovers includes Sir Positive At-All, a caricature of Sir Robert Howard, and the poet Ninny, a caricature of the Hon. Edward Howard, brother of Sir Robert, and author of Nos 78, 79, 84, and 89, below. In Act I, Sir Positive is reported as confiding to the hero Stanford his discovery of ‘two Plays, that betwixt you and I have a great deal of Wit in e’m; Those are, the Silent Woman, and the Scornful Lady [by Beaumont and Fletcher]— And if I understand any thing in the World, there’s Wit enough, in both those, to make one good Play, If I had the management of e’m’ (p. 6). In Act V, Sir Positive quotes Catiline to Ninny: ‘I’le plow up rocks steep as the Alps in dust, and lave the Tyrrhene Waters into Clouds (as my friend Cateline sayes)’; Ninny responds by quoting Hotspur from Henry IV, Part 1: ‘I’le pluck bright honour from the pale fac’d Moon (as my friend Hot-spur sayes)’ (p. 72 (really p. 80)). I have endeavour’d to represent variety of Humours (most of the persons of the Play differing in their Characters from one another) which was the practise of Ben Johnson, whom I think all Drammatick Poets ought to imitate, though none are like to come near; he being the onely person that appears to me to have made perfect Representations of Humane Life: most other Authors that I ever read, either have wilde Romantick Tales, wherein they strein Love and Honour to that Ridiculous height, that it becomes Burlesque: or in their lower Comœdies content themselves with one or two Humours at most, and those not near so perfect Characters as the admirable Johnson alwayes made, who never wrote Comedy without seven or eight considerable Humours. I never saw one except that of Falstaffe that was in my judgment comparable to any of Johnson’s considerable Humours: You will pardon this digression when I tell you he is the man, of all the World, I most passionately admire for his Excellency in Drammatick-Poetry. Though I have known some of late so Insolent to say, that Ben Johnson wrote his best Playes without Wit; imagining, that all the Wit in Playes consisted in bringing two persons upon the Stage to break Jests, and to bob one another, which they call Repartie, not

260 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

considering that there is more wit and invention requir’d in the finding out good Humor, and Matter proper for it, then in all their smart reparties. For, in the Writing of a Humor, a Man is confin’d not to swerve from the Character, and oblig’d to say nothing but what is proper to it: but in the Playes which have been wrote of late, there is no such thing as perfect Character, but the two chief persons are most commonly a Swearing, Drinking, Whoring, Ruffian for a Lover, and an impudent ill-bred tomrig for a Mistress, and these are the fine people of the Play; and there is that Latitude in this, that almost any thing is proper for them to say; but their chief Subject is bawdy, and profaness, which they call brisk writing, when the most dissolute of Men, that rellish those things well enough in private, are chok’d at e’m in publick: and, methinks, if there were nothing but the ill Manners of it, it should make Poets avoid that Indecent way of Writing. (Sig. a2r-v)

71. John Dryden cites Jonson in the controversy over rhymed drama 1668

From ‘A Defence of An Essay of Dramatique Poesy, being an Answer to the Preface of The Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma’. Included at the beginning of some copies of the second edition of Dryden’s The Indian Emperour, Or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1668); it does not appear in subsequent editions. Pepys had a copy of the second edition by 20 September (Diary, ix, 311). Dryden’s essay is a reply to Sir Robert Howard’s defence of blank verse against rhyme in his preface to The Great Favourite, Or, the Duke of Lerma (1668). It is Dryden’s last word in the controversy with his brother-in-law, begun in Dryden’s dedication to The Rival Ladies (1664), continued in Howard’s preface to Four New Plays (1665) and in Dryden’s Essay of 1667 (on the quarrel, see H.J.Oliver, Sir Robert Howard (1626–1698) (Durham, NC 1963), pp. 88–120). Jonson is listed in the essay (p. 13) among the ‘heroes’ who have dictated laws for the drama— Howard had suggested this was an impossibility—and Jonson’s practice in Catiline is cited to show the dangers of breaking the unity of place: ‘If Ben. Johnson himself will remove the Scene from Rome into Tuscany in the same Act, and from thence return to Rome, in the Scene which immediately follows; reason will consider there is no proportionable allowance of time to perform the journey, and therefore will chuse to stay at home’ (pp. 17–18). [Replying to Howard’s argument that prose dialogue in plays makes for greater verisimilitude than verse. The ‘verse’ Jonson sometimes ascends to must be rhyme.] But I will be bolder, and do not doubt to make it good, though a Paradox, that one great reason why Prose is not to be us’d in serious plays, is because it is too near the nature of converse: there may be too great a likeness; as the most skilful Painters affirm, that there may be too near a resemblance in a Picture: to take every lineament and feature is not to make an excellent piece, but to take so much only as will make a beautiful Resemblance of the whole; and, with an ingenious flattery of Nature, to heighten the beauties of some parts, and hide the deformities of the rest. For so says Horace, Ut pictura Poesis erit, etc…. Hæc amat obscurum, vult hæc sub luce videri, Judicis argutum quæ non formidat acumen. …Et quæ

262 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Desperat, tractata nitescere posse, relinquit.1 In Bartholomew-Fair, or the Lowest kind of Comedy, that degree of heightning is used, which is proper to set off that Subject: ‘tis true the Author was not there to go out of Prose, as he does in his higher Arguments of Comedy, The Fox and Alchymist; yet he does so raise his matter in that Prose, as to render it delightful; which he could never have performed, had he only said or done those very things that are daily spoken or practised in the Fair: for then the Fair itself would be as full of pleasure to an ingenious person as the Play; which we manifestly see it is not. But he hath made an excellent Lazar of it; the Copy is of price, though the Original be vile. You see in Catiline and Sejanus, where the Argument is great, he sometimes ascends to Verse, which shews he thought it not unnatural in serious Plays: and had his Genius been as proper for Rhyme, as it was for Humour; or had the Age in which he liv’d, attained to as much knowledge in Verse, as ours, ‘tis probable he would have adorn’d those Subjects with that kind of Writing. (6–7) ⋆⋆⋆ [Howard had argued against observing the unity of time in plays.] In few words my own opinion is this, (and I willingly submit it to my Adversary, when he will please impartially to consider it,) that the imaginary time of every Play ought to be contrived into as narrow a compass, as the nature of the Plot, the quality of the Persons, and variety of Accidents will allow. In Comedy I would not exceed 24 or 30 hours: for the Plot, Accidents, and Persons of Comedy are small, and may be naturally turn’d in a little compass: But in Tragedy the Design is weighty, and the Persons great, therefore there will naturally be required a greater space of time in which to move them. And this, though Ben. Johnson has not told us, yet ’tis manifestly his opinion: for you see that to his Comedies he allows generally but 24 hours; to his two Tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, a much larger time: though he draws both of them into as narrow a compass as he can: For he shews you only the latter end of Sejanus his Favour, and the Conspiracy of Catiline already ripe, and just breaking out into action. But as it is an errour on the one side, to make too great a disproportion betwixt the imaginary time of the Play, and the real time of its representation; so on the other side, ’tis an oversight to compress the accidents of a Play into a narrower compass than that in which they could naturally be produc’d. Of this last errour the French are seldom guilty, because the thinness of their Plots prevents them from it: but few English men, except Ben. Johnson, have ever made a Plot with variety of design in it, included in 24 hours which was altogether natural. For this reason, I prefer the Silent Woman before all other Plays, I think justly, as I do its Author in Judgment, above all other Poets. Yet of the two, I think that errour the most pardonable, which in too strait a compass crowds together many accidents, since it produces more variety, and consequently more pleasure to the Audience; and because the nearness of proportion betwixt the imaginary and real time does speciously cover the compression of the Accidents. (19–20) NOTE 1 ‘A poem is like a picture…. This courts the shade, that will wish to be seen in the light, and dreads not the critical insight of the judge…and what [the poet] fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons’: Horace, Ars Poetica, ll. 361, 363–4, 149–50.

72. Samuel Pepys on Bartholomew Fair, Epicoene, Catiline, and The Alchemist 1668–9

Text from the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary. (a) From the entry for 4 September 1668: on a performance of Bartholomew Fair by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street. Will Hewer (1642–1715) was a naval official and merchant, and the executor of Pepys’s will. ‘Deb’ is Deborah Willet, Mrs Pepys’s companion. Up, and met at the office all the morning; and at noon, my wife and Deb and Mercer and W.Hewer to the Fair, and there at the old house did eat a pig, and was pretty merry; but saw no sights, my wife having a mind to see the play, Bartholomew fayre with puppets; which we did, and it is an excellent play; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it; only, the business of abusing the puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest. And here Knipp came to us and sat with us, and thence took coach in two coaches; and losing one another, my wife and Knipp and I to Hercules-Pillars and there supped, and I did take from her both the words and notes of the song of the Larke, which pleases me mightily. (ix, 299) (b) From the entry for 19 September 1668: on a performance of Epicoene by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal. Mrs Knepp acted the part of Epicoene. William, second Viscount Brouncker, was a mathematician, the first President of the Royal Society, and at this time one of the Navy Commissioners. Up, and to the office, where all the morning busy; and so dined with my people at home, and then to the King’s playhouse and there saw The Silent Woman; the best comedy, I think, that was ever wrote; and sitting by Shadwell the poet, he was big with admiration of it. Here was my Lord Brouncker and W.Penn and their ladies in the box, being grown mighty kind of a sudden—but God knows, it will last but a little while, I dare swear. Knepp did her part mighty well; and so home straight and to write; and perticularly to my Cosen Roger, who, W Hewers and my wife writes me, doth use them with mighty plenty and noble entertainment, (ix, 310)

264 BEN JONSON

(c) From the entry for 19 December 1668: on a performance of Catiline by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal. Sir Philip Howard was Captain of the King’s Lifeguard and an MP. Earlier entries record talk that Catiline is to be put on at the King’s House (Diary, viii, 569); that it cannot succeed for want of good actors and in particular because of the insufficiency of Nicholas Burt for the part of Cicero, and that the king is to give the company £ 500 for costumes, ‘there being, as they say, to be sixteen scarlett robes’ (Diary, viii, 575); and that the performance will be held up for some time for want of the clothes the king had promised (Diary, ix, 20). In the month after the performance Pepys reports court gossip about Lady Harvey’s fury at being imitated by Mrs Corey in the part of Sempronia; ‘for which she got my Lord Chamberlain, her kinsman, to imprison Doll [i.e. Mrs Corey, well known for her acting of Doll Common in The Alchemist]; which my Lady Castlemayne made the King to release her, and to order her to act it again worse then ever the other day where the King himself was. And, since, it was acted again, and my Lady Harvy provided people to hiss her and fling oranges at her’ (Diary, ix, 415). H & S, ix, 241, note that the performance Pepys describes below includes a ‘fight’ for which there is no warrant in the text. Pepys mentions reading Catiline in a diary entry for 18 December 1664, where he calls it ‘a very excellent piece’ (Diary, v, 349). He later set Catiline’s first soliloquy from the play to music as a recitative (Diary, v, 349n). Up, and to the office, where all the morning; and at noon, eating very little dinner, my wife and I by hackney to the King’s playhouse and there, the pit being full, sat in a box above and saw Catetin’s Conspiracy—yesterday being the first day—a play of much good sense and words to read, but that doth appear the worst upon the stage, I mean the least divertising, that ever I saw any, though most fine in clothes and a fine Scene of the Senate and of a fight, that ever I saw in my life—but the play is only to be read. And therefore home with no pleasure at all, but only in sitting next to Betty Hall, that did belong to this House and was Sir Ph. Howard’s mistress; a mighty pretty wench, though my wife will not think so, and I dare neither commend nor be seen to look upon her or any other now, for fear of offending her. (ix, 395–6) (d) From the entry for 17 April 1669: on a performance of The Alchemist by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal. James Pearse was the leading naval surgeon of the day and a close friend of Pepys’s. Walter Clun, a leading actor of the King’s Company, had been murdered after appearing in The Alchemist, on 2 August 1664; Pepys had recorded the fact in his diary for 4 August 1664, noting that his performance as Subtle ‘was one of his best parts that he acts’ (Diary, v, 232). Pepys records seeing two performances of the play at the Vere Street theatre in 1661 (22 June and 14 August) On 22 June he called it ‘a most incomparable play’ (Diary, ii, 125). …At noon home to dinner, and there find Mr. Pierce the surgeon, and he dined with us; and there hearing that The Alchymist was acted, we did go and took him with us, at the King’s House; and is still a good play, it having not been acted for two or three years before; but I do miss Clun for the Doctor—but more, my eyes will not let me enjoy the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 265

pleasure I used to have in a play. Thence with my wife in hackney to Sir W.Coventry’s…. (ix, 522–3)

266

73. Clarendon on Jonson’s talents and achievements 1668–70

From Clarendon’s autobiography, Life of Edward, Earle of Clarendon, in Bodleian Library MS Clarendon 123. Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609–74) was the greatest royalist statesman of his century and author of The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (first published in 1704). He wrote an autobiography in 1668–70 while in exile in France, which was first published in 1759 as The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon. His association with Jonson was probably in the years 1629 to 1632 (R.W.Harris, Clarendon and the English Revolution (1983), p. 6). Whilst he was only a student of the law, and stoode at gaze and irresolute what course of life to take, his chiefe acquaintance were Ben Johnson, John Selden, Charles Cotton, John Vaughan, Sir Kellum Digby, Thomas May and Tho: Carew, and some otheres of eminent facultyes in there several wayes: Ben Johnsons name can never be forgotten, havinge by his very good learninge, and the severity of his nature, and manners, very much reformed the Stage & indeede the English poetry it selfe; his naturall advantages were judgement to order and governe fancy, rather than excesse of fancy, his productions being slow and upon deliberacion, yett then aboundinge with greate witt and fancy, and will lyve accordingly, and surely as he did exceedingly exalte the english language, in eloquence, propriety, and masculyne expressions, so was he the best judge of, and fittest to prescribe rules to poetry and poetts, of any man who had lyved with him or before him, or since, if Mr Cowly had not made a flight beyounde all men, with that modesty yett to own much of his to the example and learninge of Ben. Johnson: His conversation was very good and with the men of most note, and he had for many yeares an extraordinary kindnesse for Mr Hyde, till he found he betooke himselfe to businesse, which he believed ought never to be preferred before his company: He lyved to be very old, and till the Palsy made a deepe impression upon his body and his minde…. (48)

268

74. Charles Sackville, epilogue to an Every Man in his Humour revival 1670

Epilogue by Charles Sackville, Lord Dorset, to a revival of the play. A date for the performance of March 1670 is suggested in LS, Part i, p. 169. The epilogue was first printed (without attribution) in A Collection of Poems, Written upon Several Occasions, By several Persons (1672); it is attributed to Sackville in Helen A.Bagley, ‘A Checklist of the Poems of Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset and Middlesex’, Modern Language Notes (1932), xlvii, 454–61. Sackville (1638–1706) was a member of the Wits and a patron of a number of writers including Dryden. ‘Mr. Matthew’ in the poem is Matthew Medbourne, for whose translation of Tartuffe (performed by the same company, probably in May 1670) Dorset also wrote an epilogue (LS, Part i, p. 170). The Bold Beauchamps is a lost play attributed to Thomas Heywood; the other play referred to is evidently Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London. Intreaty shall not serve, nor violence, To make me speak in such a Playes defence. A Play where Wit and Humour do agree To break all practis’d Laws of Comedy. The Scene (what more absurd) in England lies, No Gods descend, nor dancing Devils rise; No captive Prince from nameless Country brought No battel, nay, there’s not a duel fought; And something yet more sharply might be said, But I consider the poor Author’s dead; Let that be his excuse—Now for our own, Why—Faith, in my opinion, we need none. The parts were fitted well; but some will say, Pox on’em Rogues, what made’em choose this Play? I do not doubt but you will credit me, It was not choice, but meer necessity; To all our writing friends, in Town, we sent, But not a Wit durst venture out in Lent; Have patience but till Easter Term, and then You shall have Jigg, and Hobby-horse agen. Here’s Mr. Matthew, our domestique Wit,

270 BEN JONSON

Does promise one of the ten Plays h’as writ; But since great bribes weigh nothing with the just, Know, we have merits, and in them we trust: When any Fasts, or Holy-days, defer The publick labours of the Theatre, We ride not forth, although the day be fair, On ambling Tit to take the Suburb air, But with our Authors meet, and spend that time To make up quarrels between sence and rhyme. Wednesdays and Fridays constantly we sate Till after many a long and free debate, For divers weighty reasons ’twas thought fit, Unruly sence shu’d still to rhyme submit. This the most wholesome Law we ever made, So strictly in this Epilogue obey’d, Sure no man here will ever dare to break. Enter Johnson’s Ghost. Hold, and give way, for I my self will speak; Can you encourage so much insolence, And add new faults still to the great offence Your Ancestors so rashly did commit Against the mighty powers of Art and Wit? When they condemn’d those noble works of mine, Sejanus, and my best lov’d Cataline: Repent, or on your guilty heads shall fall The curse of many a rhyming Pastoral: The three bold Beauchamps shall revive again, And with the London-Prentice conquer Spain. All the dull follies of the former age Shall rise and find applause upon this Stage. But if you pay the great arrears of praise, So long since due to my much injur’d Plays, From all past crimes I first will set you free, And then inspire some one to write like me. (29–32)

75. Richard Flecknoe answers Dryden on Jonson 1670–1

‘Former Playes and Poets vindicated’, in Book iv of Flecknoe’s Epigrams. Of all sorts, Made at Several Times, on Several Occasions (1671). This poem started life as ‘Of the difference Betwixt the Ancient and Modern Playes’ in the first edition of Flecknoe’s Epigrams of all Sorts (1670), which concluded by commenting on how ‘hard ’tis now for any one to write/With Johnson’s fire, or Fletcher’s flame & spright: /Much less inimitable Shakspears way, / Promethian-like to animate a Play’ (p. 72). The second edition has an expanded version, printed below, and a preface to its fourth book lamenting modern playwrights who ‘instead of neatly and closely plotting’ their plays like ‘our great Masters’, leave ‘nothing but loose ends and Thrums’ (p. 49). The new version seems directed at Dryden in particular, though it continues a line of argument already present in No. 62, above. In former times none ever went away But with a glowing bosom from a Play, With somewhat they had heard, or seen, so fir’d, You’d think they were celestially inspir’d: Now, we have only a few light conceits, Like Squibs and Crackers, neither warms nor heats, And sparks of wit, as much as you’d desire, But nothing of a true and solid fire. So few w’ave now a dayes know how to write with Johnsons fire, and Fletchers flame and sprite, Much less inimitable Shakespears way, Promethian-like to animate play, Compar’d to whom, for moving passion, There’s none know how to do’t now they are gon; And this for learned Johnson I shall say, As few know, now he’s gone, to plot a Play. And though for th’ writing, Criticks wont allow, Their Times as witty were, as ours are now. Yet know, who e’r thou art, dost less esteem Of Johnson for the faults oth’ Times, not him, Had he writ now, h’ad better writ than thee,

272 BEN JONSON

Hadst thou writ then, th’adst writ far worse than he; And all in spight of Envy must confess, If he be’nt worthy praise, others much less. (51–2)

76. John Dryden explains his view of Jonson 1671

From the preface to the first edition of An Evening’s Love, or The Mock-Astrologer (1671). The play was first performed in 1668; it was first published in February 1671 (Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and Drydeniana (Oxford 1939), p. 107). In the dedication of the play to the Duke of Newcastle, Dryden pays tribute to Newcastle’s earlier patronage of Jonson and Davenant, declaring himself ‘proud to be their Remembrancer’ (Sig. A3v). In the preface, printed below, Dryden replies to Shadwell’s protest in his preface to The Sullen Lovers (No. 70, above). I had thought, Reader, in this Preface to have written somewhat concerning the difference betwixt the Playes of our Age, and those of our Predecessors on the English Stage: to have shown in what parts of Dramatick Poesie we were excell’d by Ben. Johnson, I mean, humour, and contrivance of Comedy; and in what we may justly claim precedence of Shakespear and Fletcher, namely in Heroick Playes: but this design I have wav’d on second considerations; at least deferr’d it till I publish the Conquest of Granada, where the discourse will be more proper. I had also prepar’d to treat of the improvement of our Language since Fletcher’s and Johnson’s dayes, and consequently of our refining the Courtship, Raillery, and Conversation of Playes: but as I am willing to decline that envy which I shou’d draw on my self from some old Opinionatre judges of the Stage; so likewise I am prest in time so much that I have not leisure, at present, to go thorough with it. (Sig. A4r) ⋆⋆⋆ [Dryden says he will defend even the purely crowd-pleasing things in his play.] Yet I think it no vanity to say that this Comedy has as much of entertainment in it as many other[s] which have bin lately written: and, if I find my own errors in it, I am able at the same time to arraign all my Contemporaries for greater. As I pretend not that I can write humour, so none of them can reasonably pretend to have written it as they ought. Johnson was the only man of all Ages and Nations who has perform’d it well, and that but in three or four of his Comedies: the rest are but a Crambe bis cocta1; the same humours a little vary’d and written worse: neither was it more allowable in him, than it is in our present Poets, to represent the follies of particular Persons; of which many have accus’d him.

274 BEN JONSON

Parcere personis dicere de vitiis2 is the rule of Plays. And Horace tells you that the old Comedy amongst the Grecians was silenc’d for the too great liberties of the Poets. ————In vitium libertas excidit & vim Dignam lege regi: lex est accepta chorusque Turpiter obticuit, sublato jure nocendi.3 Of which he gives you the reason in another place: where having given the precept. Neve immunda crepent, ignominiosaque dicta: He immediately subjoyns, Offenduntur enim, quibus est equus, & pater, & res.4 But Ben. Johnson is to be admir’d for many excellencies; and can be tax’d with fewer failings than any English Poet. I know I have been accus’d as an enemy of his writings; but without any other reason than that I do not admire him blindly, without looking into his imperfections. For why should he only be exempted from those frailties, from which Homer and Virgil are not free? Or why should there be any ipse dixit5 in our Poetry, any more than there is in our Philosophy? I admire and applaud him where I ought: those who do more do but value themselves in their admiration of him: and, by telling you they extoll Ben. Johnson’s way, would insinuate to you that they can practice it. For my part I declare that I want judgement to imitate him: and shou’d think it a great impudence in myself to attempt it. To make men appear pleasantly ridiculous on the Stage was, as I have said, his talent: and in this he needed not the acumen of wit, but that of judgement. For the characters and representations of folly are only the effects of observation; and observation is an effect of judgement. Some ingenious men, for whom I have a particular esteem, have thought I have much injur’d Ben. Johnson when I have not allow’d his wit to be extraordinary: but they confound the notion of what is witty with what is pleasant. That Ben. Johnson’s Playes were pleasant he must want reason who denyes: But that pleasantness was not properly wit, or the sharpness of conceit; but the natural imitation of folly: which I confess to be excellent in it’s kind, but not to be of that kind which they pretend. Yet if he will believe Quintilian in his Chapter de Movendo risu, he gives his opinion of both in these following words. Stulta reprehendere facillimum est; nam per se sunt ridicula: & a derisu non procul abest risus: sed rent urbanam fecit aliqua ex nobis adjectio.6 And some perhaps wou’d be apt to say of Johnson as it was said of Demosthenes; Non displicuisse illi jocos, sed non contigisse,7 I will not deny but that I approve most the mixt way of Comedy; that which is neither all wit, nor all humour, but the result of both. Neither so little of humour as Fletcher shews, nor so little of love and wit, as Johnson. Neither all cheat, with which the best playes of the one are fill’d nor all adventure, which is the common practice of the other. I would have the characters well chosen, and kept distant from interfaring with each other; which is more than Fletcher or Shakespear did: but I would have more of the Urbana, venusta, salsa, faceta8 and the rest which Quintilian reckons up as the ornaments of wit; and these are extremely wanting in Ben. Johnson. As for repartie in particular; as it is the very soul of conversation, so it is the greatest grace of Comedy, where it is proper to the Characters: there may be much of acuteness in a thing well said; but there is more in a quick reply: sunt, enim, longe venustiora omnia in respondendo quam in provocando9. Of one thing I am sure, that no man will ever decry wit, but he who despairs of it himself; and who has no other quarrel to it but that which the Fox had to the Grapes. Yet, as Mr Cowley, (who had a greater portion of it than any man I know) tells us in his Character of Wit, rather than all wit let there be none;10 I think there’s no folly so great in any Poet of our Age as the superfluity and wast of wit was in some of our predecessors: particularly we may say of Fletcher and of Shakespear, what was said of Ovid,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 275

In omni eius ingenio, facilius quod rejici, quam quod adjici potest, invenies.11 The contrary of which was true in Virgil and our incomparable Johnson. Some enemies of Repartie have observ’d to us, that there is a great latitude in their Characters, which are made to speak it: And that it is easier to write wit than humour; because in the characters of humour, the Poet is confin’d to make the person speak what is only proper to it. Whereas all kind of wit is proper in the Character of a witty person. But, by their favour, there are as different characters in wit as in folly. Neither is all kind of wit proper in the mouth of every ingenious person. A witty Coward and a witty Brave must speak differently. Falstaffe and the Lyar,12 speak not like Don John in the Chances, and Valentine in Wit without Money.13 And Johnson’s Truwit in the Silent Woman, is a Character different from all of them. Yet it appears that this one Character of Wit was more difficult to the Author, than all his images of humour in the Play; For those he could describe and manage from his observation of men; this he has taken, at least a part of it, from books: witness the Speeches in the first Act, translated verbatim out of Ovid de Arte Amandi. To omit what afterwards he borrowed from the sixth Satyre of Juvenal against Women. However, if I should grant, that there were a greater latitude in Characters of Wit, than in those of Humour; yet that latitude would be of small advantage to such Poets who have too narrow an imagination to write it. And to entertain an Audience perpetually with Humour, is to carry them from the conversation of Gentlemen, and treat them with the follies and extravagances of Bedlam. I find I have launch’d out farther than I intended in the beginning of this Preface. And that in the heat of writing, I have touch’d at something, which I ought to have avoided. ’Tis time now to draw homeward: and to think rather of defending myself, than assaulting others. I have already acknowledg’d that this Play is far from perfect: but I do not think my self oblig’d to discover the imperfections of it to my Adversaries, any more than a guilty person is bound to accuse himself before his Judges. ’Tis charg’d upon me that I make debauch’d persons (such as they say my Astrologer and Gamester are) my Protagonists, or the chief persons of the Drama; and that I make them happy in the conclusion of my Play; against the Law of Comedy, which is to reward virtue and punish vice. I answer first, that I know no such law to have been constantly observ’d in Comedy, either by the Ancient or Modern Poets. Chœrea is made happy in the Eunuch, after having deflour’d a Virgin: and Terence generally does the same through all his Plays, where you perpetually see, not only debauch’d young men enjoy their Mistresses, but even the Courtezans themselves rewarded and honour’d in the Catastrophe. The same may be observ’d in Plautus almost every where. Ben. Johnson himself, after whom I may be proud to erre, has given me more than once the example of it. That in the Alchemist is notorious, where Face, after having contriv’d and carried on the great cozenage of the Play, and continued in it without repentance to the last, is not only forgiven by his Master, but inrich’d by his consent, with the spoiles of those whom he had cheated. And, which is more, his Master himself, a grave man, and a Widower, is introduc’d taking his Man’s counsel, debauching the Widow first, in hope to marry her afterward. In the Silent Woman, Dauphine, (who with the other two Gentlemen, is of the same character with my Celadon in the Maiden Queen, and with Wildblood in this) professes himself in love with all the Collegiate Ladies: and they likewise are all of the same Character with each other, excepting only Madam Otter, who has something singular:) yet this naughty Dauphine is crown’d in the end with the possession of his Uncles Estate, and with the hopes of enjoying all his Mistresses. And his friend Mr Truwit (the best Character of a Gentleman which Ben. Johnson ever made) is not asham’d to pimp for him. As for Beaumont and Fletcher, I need

276 BEN JONSON

not alledge examples out of them; for that were to quote almost all their Comedies. (Sig. ar–a2v) ⋆⋆⋆ [Dryden defends himself from the charge of having stolen the plots for his plays.] Most of Shakespear’s Playes, I mean the Stories of them, are to be found in the Hecatomouthi, or hundred Novels of Cinthio. I have, myself, read in his Italian, that of Romeo and Juliet, the Moor of Venice, and many others of them. Beaumont and Fletcher had most of theirs from Spanish Novels: witness the Chances, the Spanish Curate, Rule a Wife and have a Wife, the Little French Lawyer, and so many others of them as compose the greatest part of their Volume in folio. Ben. Johnson, indeed, has design’d his Plots himself; but no man has borrow’d so much from the Ancients as he has done: And he did well in it, for he has thereby beautifi’d our language. (Sig. a4r) NOTES 1 ‘The mess cooked up again’: adapted from Juvenal, Satires, 7.154. 2 ‘To spare individuals and speak of vices’. 3 ‘Its freedom sank into excess and violence deserving to be checked by law. The law was obeyed, and the chorus to its shame became mute, its right to injure being withdrawn’: Ars Poetica, ll. 282–4. 4 ‘Or cracking their bawdy and shameless jokes. For some take offence—knights, free-born, and men of substance’: Ars Poetica, ll. 247–8. 5 ‘He himself said it’, used to denote ‘an unproved assertion resting on the bare authority of some speaker’ (OED). 6 ‘It is easy to make fun of folly, for folly is laughable in itself; but we may improve such jests by adding something of our own’: Institutio Oratorio, 6.3.71. 7 ‘That he lacked the power to make jokes, not merely that he disliked to use it’: Institutio Oratorio, 6.3.2. 8 ‘Urbane, charming, piquant, elegant’. Quintilian gives definitions of these terms in Institutio Oratorio, 6.3.17–20. 9 ‘For wit always appears to greater advantage in reply than in attack’: Institutio Oratorio, 6.3. 13. 10 Cowley, ‘Ode: Of Wit’, ll. 35–6: ‘Jewels at nose, and lips but ill appear; /Rather than all things, Wit, let none be there.’ 11 ‘In regard to all the manifestations of his genius, you will find it easier to detect superfluities than deficiencies’: adapted from Institutio Oratoria, 6.3.5. 12 Corneille’s Le Menteur. In his Essay, Dryden refers to a performance in England of a translation of the play (1667 edition, pp. 37–8). 13 Both comedies by Fletcher.

77. Thomas Shadwell defends his estimate of Jonson 1670–1

(a) Epilogue to Shadwell’s The Humorists. The first performance of the play was by the Duke’s Company, at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, on 10 December 1670; the play, with the preface, was published the next year. The Mighty Prince of Poets, learned BEN, Who alone div’d into the Minds of Men: Saw all their wandrings, all their follies knew, And all their vain fantastick passions drew. In Images so lively and so true; That there each Humorist himself might view. Yet onely lash’d the Errors of the Times, And n’er expos’d the Persons, but the Crimes: And never car’d for private frowns, when he Did but chastise publick iniquitie. He fear’d no Pimp, no Pick-pocket, or Drab; He fear’d no Bravo, nor no Ruffian’s Stab. ’Twas he alone true Humors understood, And with great Wit and Judgment made them good. A Humor is the Byas of the Mind, By which with violence ’tis one way inclin’d: It makes our Actions lean on one side still, And in all Changes that way bends the will. This— He onely knew and represented right. Thus none but Mighty Johnson e’r could write. Expect not then, since that most flourishing Age, Of BEN. to see true Humor on the Stage. All that have since been writ, if they be scan’d, Are but faint Copies from that Master’s hand. Our Poet now, amongst those petty things, Alas, his too weak trifling humors brings. As much beneath the worst in Johnson’s Plays, As his great Merit is above our praise.

278 BEN JONSON

For could he imitate that great Author right, He would with ease all Poets else out-write. But to out-go all other men, would be O Noble BEN! less than to follow thee. Gallants you see how hard it is to write, Forgive all faults the Poet made to night: Since if he sinn’d, ’twas meant for your delight. Pray let this find— As good success, tho’ it be very bad, As any damn’d successful Play e’r had. Yet if you hiss, he knows not where the harm is, He’ll not defend his Non-sence Vi & Armis.1 But this poor Play has been so torn before, That all your Cruelty can’t wound it more. (79–80) (b) Extract from the preface. Shadwell is responding to Dryden’s comments in No. 76, above. [Shadwell has just protested at those who ‘wrest the Writings of poets to their own corrupted sense.’] Mr. Johnson, I believe, was very unjustly taxed for personating particular men, but it will ever be the fate of them, that write the humors of the Town, especially in a foolish, and vicious Age. Pardon me (Reader) that I name him in the same page with myself; who pretend to nothing more, than to joyn with all men of sense and learning in admiration of him; which, I think, I do not [sic] out of a true understanding of him; and for this I cannot but value my self. Yet, by extolling his way of writing, I would not insinuate to you that I can practise it; though I would if I could, a thousand times sooner than any mans. And here I must make a little digression, and take liberty to dissent from my particular friend, for whom I have a very great respect, and whose Writings I extreamly admire; and though I will not say his is the best way of writing, yet, I am sure, his manner of writing it is much the best that ever was. And I may say of him, as was said of a Celebrated Poet, Cui unquam Poetarum magis proprium fuit subito œstro incalescere? Quis, ubi incaluit, fortius, & fœlicius debacchatur.2 His Verse is smoother and deeper, his thoughts more quick and surprising, his raptures more mettled and higher; and he has more of that in his writing, which Plato calls σωɸρ να µανιαν,3 than any other Heroick Poet. And those who shall go about to imitate him, will be found to flutter, and make a noise, but never rise. Yet (after all this) I cannot think it impudence in him, or any man to endeavour to imitate Mr. Johnson, whom he confesses to have fewer failings than all the English Poets, which implies he was the most perfect, and best Poet; and why should not we endeavour to imitate him? because we cannot arrive to his excellence? ’Tis true we cannot, but this is no more an argument, than for a Soldier (who considers with himself he cannot be so great a one as Julius Cæsar) to run from his Colours, and be none; or to speak of a less thing, why should any man study Mathematicks after Archimedes, &c. This Principle would be an obstruction to the progress of all learning and knowledge in the world. Men of all Professions ought certainly to follow the best in theirs, and let not their endeavours be blamed, if they go as far as they can in the right way, though they be unsuccessful, and attain not their ends. If

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 279

Mr. Johnson be the most faultless Poet, I am so far from thinking it impudence to endeavour to imitate him, that it would rather (in my opinion) seem impudence in me not to do it. I cannot be of their opinion who think he wanted wit, I am sure, if he did, he was so far from being the most faultless, that he was the most faulty Poet of his time, but, it may be answered, that his Writings were correct, though he wanted fire; but I think flat and dull things are as incorrect, and shew as little Judgment in the Author, nay less than sprightly and mettled Nonsense does. But I think he had more true wit than any of his Contemporaries; that other men had sometimes things that seemed more fiery than his, was because they were placed with so many sordid and mean things about them, that they made a greater show. Inter quæ verbum emicuit, si forte, decorum, Si versus pauco concinnor, unus, & alter, Injuste totum ducit, venditque Poema.4 Nor can I think, to the writing of his humors (which were not onely the follies, but vices and subtleties of men) that wit was not required, but judgment; where, by the way, they speak as if judgment were a less thing than wit. But certainly it was meant other wise by nature, who subjected wit to the government of judgment, which is the noblest faculty of the mind. Fancy rough-draws, but judgement smooths and finishes; nay judgment does in deed comprehend wit, for no man can have that who has not wit. In fancy mad men equal, if not excel all others, and one may as well say that one of those mad men is as good a man as a temperate wiseman, as that one of the very fancyful Plays (admired most by Women) can be so good a Play as one of Johnson’s correct, and well-govern’d Comedies. The reason given by some, why Johnson needed not wit in writing humor, is, because humor is the effect of observation, and observation the effect of judgment; but observation is as much necessary in all other Plays, as in Comedies of humor: For first, even in the highest Tragedies, where the Scene lies in Courts, the Poet must have observed the Customs of Courts, and the manner of conversing there, or he will commit many indecencies, and make his Persons too rough and ill-bred for a Court. Besides Characters in Plays being Representations of the Vertues or Vices, Passions or Affections of Mankind, since there are no more new Vertues, or Vices; Passions, or Affections, the Idea’s of these can no other way be received into the imagination of a Poet, but either from the Conversation or Writings of Men. After a Poet has formed a Character (as suppose of an Ambitious Man) his design is certainly to write it naturally, and he has no other rule to guid him in this, but to compare him with other men of that kind, that either he has heard of, or conversed with in the world, or read of in Books (and even this reading of Books is conversing with men) nay more; (besides judging of his Character) the Poet can fancy nothing of it, but what must spring from the Observation he has made of Men, or Books. If this argument (that the enemies of humor use) be meant in this sense, that a Poet, in the writing of a Fools Character, needs but have a man sit to him, and have his words and actions taken; in this case there is no need of wit. But ’tis most certain, that if we should do so, no one fool (though the best about the Town) could appear pleasantly upon the Stage, he would be there too dull a Fool, and must be helped out with a great deal of wit in the Author. I scruple not to call it so, first, because ’tis not your downright Fool that is a fit Character for a Play, but like Sir John Dawe and Sir Amorous La Foole, your witty, brisk, aiery Fopps, that are Entreprennants.5 Besides, wit in the Writer, (I think, without any Authority for it) may be said to be the invention of remote and pleasant thoughts of what

280 BEN JONSON

kind soever; and there is as much occasion for such imaginations in the writing of a Curious Coxcomb’s part, as in writing the greatest Hero’s; and that which may be folly in the Speaker, may be so remote and pleasant, to require a great deal of wit in the Writer. The most Excellent Johnson put wit into the mouths of the meanest of his people, and which, is infinitely difficult, made it proper for ’em. And I once heard a Person, of the greatest Wit and Judgement of the Age, say, that Bartholomew Fair (which consists most of low persons) is one of the Wittiest Plays in the World. If there be no wit required in the rendering Folly ridiculous, or Vice odious, we must accuse Juvenal the best Satyrist, and wittiest Man of all the Latine Writers, for want of it. I should not say so much of Mr. Johnson (whose Merit sufficiently justifies him to all Men of Sense) but that I think my self a little obliged to vindicate the Opinion I publickly declared, in my Epilogue to this Play; which I did upon mature consideration, and with a full satisfaction in my Judgement, and not out of a bare affected vanity of being thought his Admirer. (Sig. a2r–[a4]r) NOTES 1 ‘With force and arms’. 2 ‘For what poet ever was it as natural to be inflamed with sudden inspiration? What poet when he was inflamed revelled in his poetic ecstasy with more vigour and with more felicity?’ 3 ‘Sober madness’. 4 ‘Among them, it may be a pleasing phrase shines forth, or one or two lines are somewhat better turned—then these unfairly carry off and sell the whole poem’: Horace, Epistles, 2.1. 73–5. 5 ‘Enterprising’.

78. Edward Howard on Jonson 1671

From the preface to The Womens Conquest: A Tragi-Comedy, acted in November 1670, and published the next year. Howard was the fifth son of Thomas Howard, first Earl of Berkshire, and brother of Sir Robert Howard. He is caricatured as the poet Ninny in Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers (see the headnote to No. 70, above). The preface is a defence of the mixture of comedy and heroic material in Howard’s play. See Introduction, p. 16. [On prefaces in general.] …nor do I find that the Antient Poets, or any of most repute of our Modern, assumed this kind of vindication to themselves; though perhaps they might have done it, with more assurance of success, then any that now most confidently undertake it; either as they contemn’d the impotent censures and cavils, that were spread against their performances, or else a judicious confirmation in themselves, that their works were the best defiances that could be given their Enemies. Not that I judge our unimitable Johnson, or those wonders of Wit, Beaumont and Fletcher, were without their failings, or that in some things, their Plays were not questionable, as well as ours; though I could wish our Muses were so happily adorned, as their spots and beauties appear together: and I doubt it may be truly affirmed, that in the greatest of their failings, they fell more below themselves, then beneath us; which gives us some caution not to be too busie with their faults. It is one thing to be excellent, and another to be absolutely perfect; the Diamond doth require some polishing, though of most commendable figure and brightness: The like may be said of these excellent Poets, their thoughts were always pretious, though not alike polished and set off by themselves. ⋆⋆⋆ Most men are naturally inclin’d to give to Antiquity its due respects, and there is some reason for it (if no more) in that we must be old ourselves; but he were weakly an admirer of times past, that by an over dotage on them, would continue himself in a Childhood of knowledge; since that were to go backward with ingenuity, as we set too forward theirs, they have their fame, and we must expect ours; though at present they challenge so long a prescription, that until ours does number more then the three parts of

282 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

an age, in equal repute with theirs. I make some doubt whether the best Rhime, or Reason, that the Stage is now beholding to, will establish us as great in the judgment of those who shall succeed us; which, as I am far from assuming it to my self, in behalf of any undertaking of mine, so I shall as unwillingly allow it to the boldest of Pretenders; besides this, we are obliged in so great a measure to those great Artificers of Invention, and Wit, by which they raised our Stage to its former glory, as also in a high degree for those excellent rules and observations, which (if well heeded) cannot but improve our endeavours in this kind, and from whom (if we do well) it is impossible to differ so far, as to declare them Enemies, and like the example of the Trojan Hero, to erect a Trophee and superscribe on it, Æneas hæc de Danais victoribus arma.1 (Sig. A2r–[A3]r) ⋆⋆⋆ [Howard turns to his own play.] …having made my self so far a party on the side of our former Poets, that I have composed this Play in some resemblance to theirs of the like nature, which in my judgment I have esteemed best. I have given it the name likewise of Tragi-Comedy, as I find they have done some of theirs, which I need not particularize to the Reader, because they are well enough known to be at this day no inconsiderable ornament and entertainment of the Stage; not that I will undertake to justifie the word (since every Play, if strictly taken, must be either Tragedy or Comedy, excluding Farce, which does not so much as deserve a Dramatis Personæ to be set before it, as we shall soon manifest). And it was doubtless created by former Poets, who finding that mixt Plays were very sutable to the English Stage, and that it was somewhat below the denomination of their Heroicks to call them simply Comedies (which as they are corruptly understood, imply, little more then scurrility and laughter, though of far greater dignity, if rightly apply’d) They allow’d them the names of Tragi-Comedies, & I do not find but the highest of our English Tragedies (as Cataline, The Maids Tragedy, Rollo, The Cardinal and Traytor) considerable enough to be rank’d with the best of these, are at all undervalued by their Authors, in being sweetned with mirth; for as all people do not come purposely to sympathize their passions with those of the Plays, so some will expect to be diverted accordingly; nor do I believe that it is less natural (as some have thought) to form a Play, that shall have this variety of Genius, then I do to find of mankind some grave, reserv’d, fierce, cruel, others of more aiery and pleasant converse, to mingle humours and affairs together. (Sig. [A3]v–[A4]r) [Discussing the use of rhymed verse in plays, and having quoted approvingly from Und., 29, on the subject.] …whensoever Verse was us’d by Ben Johnson, as it is in Sylla’s Ghost, or scatter’d in some places in Sejanus; I cannot but observe his Art and Nature together, in not confining the periods of sense and Rhime together (as is too much us’d now) but most commonly by carrying the sense of one verse into part of another, which elevates the stile of Verse (as is to be seen in Virgil) and without which it will never shew so like Prose, and proper for Dialogue, as it ought to do; an example to be worthily imitated by such as will write in Verse, to whose consideration I presume to commend it. (Sig. ar–v) ⋆⋆⋆

BEN JONSON 283

Words are the children of thought, and man must be granted to have first imagined speech, before he could express any conception of his by words; so that thought, was both the primitive ground, and glory of Tongues, which successively came to be more improved; and doubtless it was the Wit of Poets that (above all) refin’d their own languages; so that I wonder to find it affirmed, that Ben. Johnson (who had such a soul of thought) did by Translating beautifie our Tongue; as if his ingenuity was not to be allowed the glory of doing far more by its single strength. I should be loth to wish any so ill, as that he were alive to answer the imputation; however, I could be well content, that such as will make him their president in Translating from others, could dispose of it so well, and that they had like wise as much Wit, and Learning besides. Translating, may I grant, adds some perfection to a language, because it introduces the wit of others into its own words, as the French have of late done well in theirs; and we have pretty well requited their kindness to us, in rendring so much of theirs in ours; but where I can make use of good Originals, I shall be more sparing of my esteem of Copies, and I dare averre, that the Ingenuities of Johnson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, with some other of our former Poets, left our language more improved, as it expressed their thoughts, then if the best of Italian, Spanish, and French Wit, had been Translated by the greatest of Pens. I wish it be our good fortune (for the benefit of future times) to leave our Tongue as much inlarged and imbellished, as they left it to us. (Sig. [a3]v–[a4]r) ⋆⋆⋆ …For as in the characters of Tragedy there will be some violent in love, others haughty, rash, and turbulent, above what is ordinary to be observed in men; so Comedy will have its extravagancies (besides many more) in morose, heedless, timorous and foolish persons, which are images of the like contrary effects of nature; in like manner, the designs and adventures depending on these, have their proportions; for as Dramatick characters will have some remoteness from the ordinary actions of men, so must their undertakings be sutable; wherefore I wonder to find it affirmed, that extravagancies of actions should be fixed on Farce, (which is rather an entertainment of Mimikry, than a Play in any kind) since Plays must not be so even, as to represent nothing above nature, which were to make them more reasonable, then Poetical; besides, it is a commendable license (especially in Poetry) to represent what is rather useful to know, (as it seems actually done) then the possibility of it, so it provide well for our manners; as we see in Comedies, where we are taught from the mouths of Fools, and by such extravagancies as are in some kind impossible to be supposed, how we may become the wiser; why else did our learned Johnson compleat that great work of his Alchymist, with such persons that continue a prosecution of extravagancy of humour or impossibility together, (except the making of the Philosophers Stone be held a known truth) or that his Dol Common representing the Queen of Fairies, was not to pass upon the weak capacity of Dapper deceived by it? The same may be affirmed of his Cynthias Revells, where Cupid, Mercury, and Eccho have parts, or somewhat more extraordinary in his Devil’s an Ass, where the grand Demon, and a lesser, are made characters, as Satyrical Reflections on Vanity and Vice, to be corrected by them; which shews, that the truth or possibility of the characters, is less to be considered, then the Morality they aim at. Et hercule omnis salsa dicendi ratio in eo est, ut aliter quam est rectum verumque dicatur2, as Quintilian observes. (Sig. b2v–[b3]r) ⋆⋆⋆ [On the proper use of ‘vulgar’ characters in comedy.]

284 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

…here I cannot chuse but reflect on our mean imitation of French Plays, by introducing of servants and waiting women to have parts, without being essential characters; an error well avoided by our former writers, who never admitted any, otherwise then as messengers and attendants, except on the account of being characters, as is to be seen by Numphs in Bartholomew Fair, and Face in the Alchymist; the latter of which (notwithstanding what can be objected against him) may deservedly be granted one of the best parts on our English Stage. (Sig. [b4]r–v) ⋆⋆⋆ NOTES 1 ‘These arms Aeneas from victorious Greeks’: Virgil, Aeneid. 3.288. 2 ‘Indeed the essence of all wit lies in the distortion of the true and natural meaning of words’: Institutio Oratorio, 6.3.89.

79. Edward Howard on Jonson’s imaginary creations 1671

From Howard’s preface to The Six days Adventure, Or The New Utopia, acted by the Duke’s Company at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in March 1671, and published later in the year. The play was a complete failure on stage; in the preface, Howard comforts himself with the example of the neglect of the old English dramatists on the contemporary stage—they who, he says, brought the stage to ‘a non ultra of designe and wit’ and gave the world ‘the best Dramatique Rules, and Plays together’ (Sig. A2r) —and of those who have tried to follow their principles (Aphra Behn echoes the sentiment in her commendatory poem to the play). Specifically, he rebuts charges that his characters are not realistic by the example of the fantastic characters of The Devil is an Ass and Cynthia’s Revels, and by the improbabilities in the conception of Morose (an interesting contrast to the legend Dryden passed on of there having been a real prototype for the character). In this and the preface to The Womens Conquest (No. 78, above) Howard makes a case for heroic comedy, a cause also championed at this time by Dryden. And I differ from their judgments who think, that whatsoever is not vulgarly observ’d amongst men, to be therefore not Poetically allowable, which if true, the wit of Poetry were rather commonplace and observation, than invention, in no case to be allow’d. Wherefore there needs no practicable authority for every Character that is produced, if what has been never before observ’d, answer the design of the Author in being useful and corrective to manners, the essential dignity of Comedy, and without which it has small title to that name or desert; besides a Satyr cannot be poetically expressed but it must be highly Hyperbolical, as may be seen in those of Juvenal’s, as also in most of the comedies of Ben Johnson in which are very many characters of no being amongst men, as in his Devil’s an Ass, Cinthio’s Revels, and others; nay in his more exact one of the silent Woman, I doubt not to affirm that there was never such a man as Morose who convers’d by a whisper through a Trunk, but the Poets authority in that case is sufficient for what is not probable, because it was an extravagancy well applyed to the humour of such a person, which is sufficient to direct us that things may be allow’d in a Poetical scnce which are not naturally so. Who ever disputed against the wonders mention’d by the Poets, the Metamorphosis of Ovid, Aesop’s Fables and the like, by reason that the moral of them is more to be regarded than the truth; which consideration has been the best and general

286 BEN JONSON

authority of introducing of Fables: wherefore to such as are different in opinion, there needs no other reply, but that they are little skill’d in the Muses, and must be beholding to their ignorance for their excuse. (Sig. [A4]r–v)

80. Edward Ravenscroft, Jonson the model for didactic comedy 1671

‘To the Author of the New Utopia’, prefixed to Howard’s The Six Days Adventure, Or The New Utopia. Ravenscroft (c. 1650–c. 1700) wrote a number of plays, mostly translations and adaptations (including a Titus Andronicus, produced in 1678), and quarrelled with Dryden after attacking him in the prologue to his first play, Mamamouchi, or the Citizen turned Gentleman (1671). In the prologue to his The Canterbury Guests; Or, A Bargain Broken (1695), Ravenscroft pictures a previous age, unlike the present one, ‘When Bully Ben lugg’d out in Cat’line’s Cause, /And huff’d his duller Audience to Applause, /Then if the Poet swore ’twas good, each Guest/Believ’d the Author, and approv’d the Feast’. 1. How happy, Sir, was the last age When learned Johnson rul’d the Stage That strict observer of mankind. Men were the Books he read, and he Made the whole town his Librarie; Theatres were then the Schools Of good morality, where Knaves and Fools Their follies saw, and vices acted so, Shame, those made honester, these, wiser grow. In every Scene he writ we find With Pleasure Profit joyn’d, And every Comedie He did intend An Errata Page should be, To show men faults and teach ’em how to mend. 2. But this age disesteems true Comedy ’Cause ’tis the mirrour of the times…. ⋆⋆⋆

288 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

3. But you adventure to retrive The fading glories of the Stage, Whilst this Play you more than give To the unthankful age. Great Ben thought it enough to swear That his were good Believe me so they are, Could we but find a man had as much wit To read and judg of them as he that writ. The same fate now Do’s your Play disallow, ’Tis lik’d by as few as understood. Our age before Ne’er had a Play like this, nor e’er again Will such another see, less you once more Imploy your Pen, Which you must do in scorn of them That for your virtue do your wit condemn. Their spight Brings you more praise than all your friends can write, And does assert Your Fame: For where there’s envy, there’s desert, That still at excellence doth aim. So mungrel Curs are known To bark against the brightness of the Moon…. (Sig. a4r-v; ll. 1–17, 31–56)

81. On Jonson and Shakespeare 1672

A ‘Prologue to Julius Caesar’, possibly by Dryden. Printed in Covent Garden Drolery, or a Colection, Of all the Choice Songs, Poems, Prologues and Epilogues, (Sung and Spoken at Courts and Theaters) never in Print before (1672), collected by ‘R.B. Servant to His Majesty’. No external evidence connects the poem to Dryden, but the views expressed are certainly close to his. (The Oxford edition of Dryden’s Poems includes the ‘Prologue’, the California edition of his Works does not.) A date for the performance of January 1672 is suggested in LS, Part i, p. 191. In Country Beauties as we often see, Something that takes in their simplicity. Yet while they charm, they know not they are fair, And take without their spreading of the snare; Such Artless beauty lies in Shakespears wit, ’Twas well in spight of him what ere he writ. His Excellencies came and were not sought, His words like causal Atoms made a thought: Drew up themselves in Rank and File, and writ, He wondring how the Devil it were such wit. Thus like the drunken Tinker, in his Play, He grew a Prince, and never knew which way. He did not know what trope or Figure meant, But to perswade is to be eloquent, So in this Cæsar which this day you see, Tully ne’r spoke as he makes Anthony, Those then that tax his Learning are too blame, He knew the thing, but did not know the Name: Great Johnson did that Ignorance adore, And though he envi’d much, admir’d him more, The faultless Johnson equally writ well, Shakespear made faults; but then did more excel. One close at Guard like some old Fencer lay, Tother more open, but he shew’d more play. In Imitation Johnsons wit was shown,

290 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Heaven made his men but Shakespear made his own. Wise Johnson’s talent in observing lay, But others follies still made up his play. He drew the like in each elaborate line, But Shakespear like a Master did design. Johnson with skill dissected humane kind, And show’d their faults that they their faults might find. But then as All Anatomists must do, He to the meanest of mankind did go. And took from Gibbets such as he would show. Both are so great that he must boldly dare, Who both of ’em does judge and both compare. If amongst Poets one more bold there be, The man that dare attempt in either way, is he. (9–10)

82. John Dryden on the faults of predecessors like Jonson 1672

From the material appended to the printed version of Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada By The Spaniards: In Two Parts (1672), first performed in successive parts in December 1670 and January 1671. (a) From the ‘Epilogue to the Second Part of Granada’. They, who have best succeeded on the Stage, Have still conform’d their Genius to their Age. Thus Jonson did Mechanique humour show, When men were dull, and conversation low. Then, comedy was faultless, but ’twas course: Cobbs Tankard was a jest, and Otter’s horse. And as their Comedy, their love was mean: Except, by chance, in some one labour’d Scene, Which must attone for an ill-written Play. They rose; but at their height could seldome stay. Fame then was cheap, and the first commer sped; And they have kept it since, by being dead, But were they now to write when Critiques weigh Each Line, and ev’ry word, throughout a Play, None of ’em, no not Jonson, in his height Could pass, without allowing grains for weight. Think it not envy that these truths are told, Our Poet’s not malicious, though he’s bold. ’Tis not to brand ’em that their faults are shown, But, by their errours, to excuse his own. If Love and Honour now are higher rais’d, ’Tis not the Poet, but the Age is prais’d. Wit’s now ariv’d to a more high degree; Our native Language more refin’d and free. Our Ladies and our men now speak more wit In conversation, than those Poets writ. Then, one of these is, consequently, true; That what this Poet writes comes short of you,

292 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

And imitates you ill, (which most he fears) Or else his writing is not worse than theirs. Yet, though you judge, (as sure the Critiques will) That some before him writ with greater skill, In this one praise he has their fame surpast, To please an Age more Gallant than the last. (159–60) (b) From ‘Of Heroic Plays: An Essay’, which appears after the dedication at the beginning of the volume. To those who object my frequent use of Drums and Trumpets; and my representations of Battels, I answer, I introduc’d them not on the English Stage, Shakespear us’d them frequently: and, though Jonson shows no Battel in his Catiline, yet you hear from behind the Scenes, the sounding of Trumpets, and the shouts of fighting Armies. But, I add farther; that these warlike Instruments, and, even the representations of fighting on the Stage, are no more than necessary to produce the effects of an Heroic Play, that is, to raise the imagination of the Audience, and to perswade them, for the time, that what they behold on the Theater is really perform’d. The Poet is, then, to endeavour an absolute dominion over the minds of the Spectators: for, though our fancy will contribute to its own deceipt, yet a Writer ought to help its operation. ⋆⋆⋆ [Dryden is defending his hero Almanzor; in what he says below he attributes to Cethegus some of Catiline’s statements as well as those properly his.] He talks extravagantly in his Passion: but, if I would take the pains to quote an hundred passages of Ben. Johnson’s Cethegus, I could easily shew you that the Rhodomontades of Almanzor are neither so irrational as his, nor so impossible to be put in execution. For Cethegus threatens to destroy Nature, and to raise a new one out of it: to kill all the Senate for his part of the action; to look Cato dead; and a thousand other things as extravagant, he sayes, but performs not one Action in the Play. (Sig. [a4]v-b2r) (c) From ‘Defence of the EPILOGUE. Or, An Essay on the Dramatique Poetry of the last Age’. To begin with Language. That an Alteration is lately made in ours or since the Writers of the last Age (in which I comprehend Shakespear, Fletcher and Jonson) is manifest. Any man who reads those excellent Poets, and compares their language with what is now written, will see it almost in every line. But, that this is an Improvement of the Language, or an alteration for the better, will not so easily be granted. For many are of a contrary opinion, that the English tongue was then in the height of its perfection; that, from Jonsons time to ours, it has been in a continual declination; like that of the Romans from the Age of Virgil to Statius, and so downward to Claudian: of which, not onely Petronius, but Quintilian himself so much complains, under the person of Secundus, in his famous Dialogue de causis corruptæ eloquentiæ. (162) ⋆⋆⋆ …I was speaking of their Sence and Language, and I dare almost challenge any man to show me a page together, which is correct in both. As for Ben. Johnson, I am loath to name

BEN JONSON 293

him, because he is a most Judicious Writer; yet he very often falls into these errors. And I once more beg the Readers pardon, for accusing him or them. Onely let him consider that I live in an age where my least faults are severely censur’d: and that I have no way left to extenuate my failings but my showing as great in those whom we admire. Cædimus, inque vicem præbemus cura sagittis.1 I cast my eyes but by chance on Catiline; and in the three or four first pages, found enough to conclude that Johnson writ not correctly. ————Let the long hid seeds Of treason, in thee, now shoot forth in deeds Ranker than honour. [1.25–7] In reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth, which are not to be understood, he us’d to say that it was horrour, and I am much afraid that this is so. Thy parricide, late on thy onely Son, After his mother, to make empty way For thy last wicked Nuptials, worse than they That blaze that act of thy incestuous life, Which gain’d thee at once a daughter and a wife. [1.32–6] The Sence is here extreamly perplex’d: and I doubt the word They is false Grammar. ———And be free Not Heaven it self from thy impiety, [1.59–60] A Synchœsis, or ill placing of words, of which Tully so much complains in Oratory. The Waves, and Dens of beasts cou’d not receive The bodies that those souls were frighted from. [1.250–1] The Preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observ’d in my own writings. What all the several ills that visit earth, Plague, famine, fire, could not reach unto, The Sword nor surfeits, let thy fury do. [1.49, 51–2] Here are both the former faults: for, besides that the Preposition unto, is plac’d last in the verse, and at the half period, and is redundant, there is the former Synchœsis, in the words (The Sword nor Surfeits) which in construction ought to have been plac’d before the other. Catiline sayes of Cethegus, that for his sake he would Go on upon the Gods; kiss Lightning, wrest The Engine from the Cyclops, and give fire At face of a full clowd, and stand his ire. [1.143–5] To go on upon, is onely to go on twice, to give fire at face of a full cloud, was not understood in his own time: (and stand his ire) besides the antiquated word ire there is the Article His, which makes false construction: and Giving fire at the face of a cloud, is a perfect image of shooting, however it came to be known in those daies to Catiline. ———others there are Whom Envy to the State draws and pulls on, For Contumelies receiv’d; and such are sure ones. [1. 146–8] Ones in the plural Number: but that is frequent with him; for he sayes, not long after. Cæsar and Crassus; if they be ill men, Are Mighty ones. Such Men they do not succour more the cause, &c. [4.530–1; 4.56] They redundant.

294 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Though Heav’n should speak with all his wrath at once; We should stand upright and unfear’d. [4.30, 32] His is ill Syntax with Heaven; and by Unfear’d he means Unaffraid, words of a quite contrary signification. The Ports are open, [4.302] He perpetually uses Ports for Gates: which is an affected error in him, to introduce Latine by the loss of the English Idiom: as in the Translation of Tully’s Speeches he usually does. Well placing of Words for the sweetness of pronunciation was not known till Mr. Waller introduc’d it: and therefore ’tis not to be wonder’d if Ben Johnson has many such lines as these But being bred up in his father’s needy fortunes, Brought up in’s sister’s Prostitution, &c. [4.122– 3] But meaness of expression one would think not to be his error in a Tragedy, which ought to be more high and sounding than any other kind of Poetry, and yet amongst many others in Catiline I find these four lines together: So Asia, thou art cruelly even With us, for all the blows thee given: When we, whose Vertues conquer’d thee, Thus, by thy Vices, ruin’d be. [1.587–90] Be there is false English; for are: though the Rhyme hides it. But I am willing to close the Book, partly out of veneration to the Author, partly out of weariness to pursue an argument which is so fruitful in so small a compass. And what correctness, after this, can be expected from Shakespear or from Fletcher, who wanted that Learning and Care which Johnson had? I will therefore spare my own trouble of inquiring into their faults: who had they liv’d now, had doubtless written more correctly. I suppose it will be enough for me to affirm (as I think I safely may) that these and the like errors which I tax’d in the most correct of the last Age, are such, into which we doe not ordinarily fall. I think few of our present Writers would have left behind them such a line as this, Contain your Spirit in more stricter bounds. [EMO, Induction, l. 46] But that gross way of two Comparatives was then, ordinary: and therefore more pardonable in Johnson. (164–8) ⋆⋆⋆ [Dryden turns to the writing of wit in the older dramatists.] For Ben. Johnson, the most judicious of Poets, he always writ properly; and as the Character requir’d: and I will not contest farther with my Friends who call that Wit. It being very certain, that even folly it self, well represented, is Wit in a larger signification: and that there is Fancy, as well as Judgement in it; though not so much or noble: because all Poetry being imitation, that of Folly is a lower exercise of Fancy, though perhaps as difficult as the other: for ’tis a kind of looking downward in the Poet; and representing that part of Mankind which is below him. In these low Characters of Vice and Folly, lay the excellency of that inimitable Writer: who, when at any time, he aim’d at Wit, in the stricter sence, that is, Sharpness of Conceit, was forc’d either to borrow from the Ancients, as, to my knowledge he did very much from Plautus: or, when he trusted himself alone, often fell into meanness of

BEN JONSON 295

expression. Nay, he was not free from the lowest and most groveling kind of Wit, which we call clenches; of which, Every Man in his Humour, is infinitely full, and, which is worse, the wittiest persons in the Drama speak them. His other Comedies are not exempted from them: will you give me leave to name some few? Asper, in which Character he personates himself, (and he neither was, nor thought himself a fool,) exclaiming against the ignorant Judges of the Age, speaks thus. How monstrous and detested is’t, to see A fellow, that has neither Art nor Brain, Sit like an Aristarchus, or Stark-Ass, Taking Mens Lines, with a Tobacco-Face, In Snuffe, &c. [EMO, Induction, ll. 177–81] And presently after I mar’le whose wit ’twas to put a Prologue in yond Sackbut’s mouth? they might well think he would be out of Tune, and yet you’d play upon him too [EMO, Prologue]. Will you have another of the same stamp? O, I cannot abide these limbs of Sattin, or rather Satan. [EMO, 4.4.14–15] But, it may be you will object that this was Asper, Macilente, or, Carlo Buffone: you shall, therefore, hear him speak in his own person: and, that, in the two last lines, or sting of an Epigram; ’tis Inscrib’d to Fine Grand: who, he says, was indebted to him for many things, which he reckons there: and concludes thus; Forty things more, dear Grand, which you know true, For which, or pay me quickly, or I’le pay you [Epig. 73, ll. 21–2] This was then the mode of wit, the vice of the Age and not Ben. Johnson’s, for you see, a little before him, that admirable wit, Sir Philip Sidney, perpetually playing with his words. In his time, I believe, it ascended first into the Pulpit: where (if you will give me leave to clench too) it yet finds the benefit of its Clergy, for they are commonly the first corrupters of Eloquence, and the last reform’d from vicious Oratory: as a famous Italian has observ’d before me, in his Treatise of the Corruption of the Italian Tongue; which he principally ascribes to Priests and preaching Friars. But, to conclude with what brevity I can; I will only add this in the defence of our present Writers, that if they reach not some excellencies of Ben. Jonson; (which no Age, I am confident, ever shall) yet, at least, they are above that meanness of thought which I have tax’d, and which is frequent in him. That the wit of this Age is much more Courtly, may easily be prov’d by viewing the Characters of Gentlemen which were written in the last. First, for Jonson, True-Wit in the Silent Woman, was his Master-piece, and True-wit was a Scholar-like kind of man, a Gentleman with an allay of Pedantry: a man who seems mortifi’d to the world, by much reading. The best of his discourse, is drawn, not from the knowledge of the Town, but Books, and, in short, he would be a fine Gentleman, in an University. (170–2) ⋆⋆⋆ And this leads me to the last and greatest advantage of our writing, which proceeds from conversation. In the Age, wherein those Poets liv’d, there was less of gallantry than in ours; neither did they keep the best company of theirs. Their fortune has been much like that of Epicurus, in the retirement of his Gardens: to live almost unknown, and to be celebrated after their decease. I cannot find that any of them were conversant in Courts, except Ben. Jonson: and his genius lay not so much that way, as to make an improvement by it. Greatness was not, then, so easy of access, nor conversation so free as now it is. I cannot, therefore, conceive it any insolence to affirm, that, by the knowledge, and pattern

296 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

of their wit, who writ before us, and by the advantage of our own conversation, the discourse and Raillery of our Comedies excell what has been written by them, and this will be deny’d by none, but some few old fellows who value themselves on their acquaintance with the Black-Friars: who, because they saw their Playes, would pretend a right to judge ours. The memory of these grave Gentlemen is their only Plea for being Wits, they can tell a story of Ben. Jonson, and perhaps have had fancy enough to give a supper in Apollo that they might be call’d his Sons: and because they were drawn in to be laught at in those times, they think themselves now sufficiently intitled to laugh at ours. Learning I never saw in any of them, and wit no more than they could remember. In short, they were unlucky to have been bred in an unpolish’d Age, and more unlucky to live to a refin’d one. They have lasted beyond their own, and are cast behind ours: and not contented to have known little at the age of twenty, they boast of their ignorance at three score. (172–3) ⋆⋆⋆ [The conclusion of the essay.] Let us therefore admire the beauties and the heights of Shakespear, without falling after him into a carelesness and (as I may call it) a Lethargy of thought, for whole Scenes together. Let us imitate, as we are able, the quickness and easiness of Fletcher, without proposing him as a pattern to us, either in the redundancy of his matter, or the incorrectness of his language. Let us admire his wit and sharpness of conceit; but, let us at the same time acknowledge that it was seldome so fix’d, and made proper to his characters, as that the same things might not be spoken by any person in the Play. Let us applaud his Scenes of Love; but, let us confess that he understood not either greatness or perfect honour in the parts of any of his women. In fine, let us allow, that he had so-much fancy, as when he pleas’d he could write wit: but that he wanted so much Judgment as seldome to have written humour; or describ’d a pleasant folly. Let us ascribe to Jonson the height and accuracy of Judgment, in the ordering of his Plots, his choice of characters, and maintaining what he had chosen, to the end. but let us not think him a perfect pattern of imitation; except it be in humour: for Love, which is the foundation of all Comedies in other Languages, is scarcely mention’d in any of his Playes. and for humour it self, the Poets of this Age will be more wary than to imitate the meanness of his persons. Gentlemen will now be entertain’d with the follies of each other; and though they allow Cob and Tib to speak properly, yet they are not much pleas’d with their Tankard or with their Raggs: And, surely, their conversation can be no jest to them on the Theatre, when they would avoid it in the street. To conclude all, let us render to our Predecessors what is their due, without confineing our selves to a servile imitation of all they writ: and, without assuming to our selves the Title of better Poets, let us ascribe to the gallantry and civility of our age the advantage which we have above them; and to our knowledge of the customs and manners of it, the happiness we have to please beyond them. (174–5) NOTE 1 ‘We keep smiting by turns and by turns presenting our own legs to the arrow’: Persius, Satires, 4.42.

83. Aphra Behn on Shakespeare and Jonson 1673

From the preface to The Dutch Lover: A Comedy, produced at the Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Garden, in February 1673, and printed in the same year. Behn (c. 1640–89) had her first play, The Forced Marriage, produced in 1670, and thereafter made her living as a playwright, the first woman in the English theatre to do so. In the prologue to her second play, The Amorous Prince (1671), she had divided the audience into the ‘grave Dons who love no Play/But what is regular, Great Johnson’s way’, and are ‘for things well said with spirit and soul’ and the rest, who would rather hear ‘a smutty jest’ from the low comedians of the day, than ‘a Scene/ Of the admir’d and well-penn’d Cataline’. In the present preface, less flatteringly to Jonson, she suggests that there is an element of affectation in the ‘Sect’ of his admirers. See Introduction, p. 16. …For waving the examination, why women having equal education with men, were not as capable of knowledge, of whatever sort as well as they: I’l only say as I have touch’d before, that Plays have no great room for that which is mens great advantage over women, that is Learning: We all well know that the immortal Shakespears Plays (who was not guilty of much more of this than often falls to womens share) have better pleas’d the World than Johnsons works, though by the way ’tis said that Benjamin was no such Rabbi neither, for I am inform’d his Learning was but Grammer high; (sufficient indeed to rob poor Salust of his best Orations) and it hath been observ’d, that they are apt to admire him most confoundedly, who have just such a scantling of it as he had; and I have seen a man the most severe of Johnsons Sect, sit with his Hat remov’d less than a hairs breadth from one sullen posture for almost three hours at the Alchymist; who at that excellent Play of Harry the Fourth (which yet I hope is far enough from Farce) hath very hardly kept his Doublet whole; but affectation hath always had a greater share both in the actions and discourse of men than truth and judgement have: and for our Modern ones, except our most unimitable Laureat, I dare to say I know of none that write at such a formidable rate, but that a woman may well hope to reach their greatest hights. Then for their musty rules of Unity, and God knows what besides, if they meant any thing, they are enough intelligable, and as practible by a woman; but really methinks they that disturb their heads with any other rules of Playes besides the making them pleasant, and avoiding of scurrility, might much better be imploy’d in studying how to improve mens too too imperfect knowledge of that antient English Game, which hight long Laurence:1 And if Comedy should be the Picture of ridiculous mankind, I wonder any one should think it such a sturdy task, whilst we are furnish’d with such precious

298 BEN JONSON

Originals as him, I lately told you of; if at least that Character do not dwindle into Farce, and so become too mean an entertainment for those persons who are us’d to think. (Sig. ar-v) NOTE 1 To play at Lawrence is to do nothing, to laze.

84. Edward Howard, Jonson unparalleled among ancient or modern authors 1673

From the essay ‘Criticism and Censure’, in Howard’s Poems, and Essays: With a Paraphrase on Cicero’s Laelius, or Of Friendship (1673). Howard has a number of tributes to Jonson in this volume: in his poem ‘The Interrogation’ he notes that in most of the ‘admired Scenes’ of ‘Elaborate Ben’, as well as those of Fletcher and Shakespeare, ‘Their Busines or their Passion turns to Love’ (pp. 13–14); echoing the thought of the extract below, Howard cites ‘our eternal Ben’ in the poem ‘The Farewel’ as one of those who is valued less than the ‘mean Wit’s’ of the present day (p. 37); and Jonson’s wish that Shakespeare had blotted out a thousand of his lines is quoted with implicit approval (in the essay ‘Of my Self’, p. 81). [The great critic Scaliger should attend to his own mistakes as well as to those of other writers]. But how much more should our small siz’d Wits and Criticks take care of their presumptuous Descants and carpings at men’s performances, when they are scarcely well vers’d in the common places of Grammar and Sense? nay, when there is nothing more to be abominated by the judicious, than what they call wit, and would so father on the world? The Press as well as the Stage has enough of their endeavours and applauses; the latter of which is transformed by these new Wits and their Poets into the most hideous license of Scurrility, Bawdery, and Prophaneness as can be imaginable, and no less an offence to discreet and modest observers. Yet with this stuff, they are ready to vie with all former commendable Writers: Shakespear, Beaumont, Fletcher and Johnson, must be nothing with them, though such majestick strength of Wit and Judgement is due to their Dramatique Pieces. Of Johnson, I dare affirm that he is yet unparallel’d by the world, and may be some succeeding Ages: He gave our English Tongue firmness, greatness, enlarged and improved it, without patching of French words to our speech, according to some of our modern Pens: insomuch that I question whether any of the Wit of the Latine Poets be more Terse and Eloquent in their Tongue, than this great and Learned Poet appears in ours. (23–4)

300

85. Edward Phillips on Jonson’s achievements 1675

From his Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets (1675). This set of summary lives of the poets grew out of a Latin catalogue of English poets—Compendiosa Enumeratio Poetarum—published as an appendix to Johannes Buchler, Sacrarum Profanarumque Phrasium Poeticarum Thesaurus (1669). The Theatrum Poetarum was later published in an enlarged version by Sir Egerton Brydges, as volume i of Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (1800). Phillips (1630–? 96), Milton’s nephew and pupil, published poems, two novels, a humorous miscellany and English and Latin dictionaries. He was tutor to John Evelyn’s son and to the son of the fifth Earl of Pembroke. In his continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1643), published in 1660, Phillips included Jonson in a list of the ‘Resplendent’ poets of Charles I’s time (p. 503); when he revised the list in the 1670 edition, Jonson was highlighted as a poet who ‘by his profound Learning and Judgement, shewed a Poet was to be as well made as born’, while Shakespeare, though not named, must be the poet celebrated as one who ‘though he wanted Learning, made as high and noble flights as fancy could advance without it’ (p. 604). Benjamin Johnson, the most learned, judicious and correct, generally so accounted, of our English Comedians, and the more to be admired for being so, for that neither the height of natural parts[,] for he was no Shakespear, nor the cost of Extraordinary Education; for he is reported but a Bricklayers Son, but his own proper Industry and Addiction to Books advanct him to this perfection: In three of his Comedies, namely the Fox, Alchymist and Silent Woman he may be compared, in the Judgement of Learned Men, for Decorum, Language, and well Humouring of the parts, as well with the chief of the Ancient Greek and Latin Comedians as the prime of the modern Italians, who have been judg’d the best of Europe for a happy vein in Comedies, nor is his Bartholomew-Fair much short of them; as for his other Comedies Cinthia’s Revells, Poetaster, and the rest, let the name of Ben Johnson protect them against whoever shall think fit to be severe in censure against them: The Truth is, his Tragedies Sejanus and Catiline seem to have in them more of an artificial and inflate than of a pathetical and naturally Tragic height: In the rest of his Poetry, for he is not wholly Dramatic, as his Underwoods, Epigrams, &c. he is sometimes bold and strenuous, sometimes Magisterial, sometimes Lepid and full enough of conceit, and sometimes a Man as other Men are. (19–20)

302

86. John Dryden, Jonson distinguished from Shadwell 1676

From Mac Flecknoe, or a Satyr upon the Tru-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S. (1682). There are strong arguments for 1676 as the date of composition: see David M.Vieth, ‘The Discovery of the Date of Mac Flecknoe’, in Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn, ed. René Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford 1979), pp. 63–87. This satire on Shadwell as the rightful successor to Richard Flecknoe as absolute ruler of ‘the Realms of Nonsense’ ridicules Shadwell’s attempts to establish himself as a successor to Jonson. In an earlier passage, Shadwell’s throne is placed in a theatre in the Barbican: ‘Great Fletcher never treads in Buskins here, Nor greater Johnson dares in socks appear’ (ll. 79–80). See Introduction, pp. 15–16. [Flecknoe is instructing Mac Flecknoe.] Nor let false Friends seduce thy Mind to Fame, By Arrogating Johnson’s Hostile Name; Let Father Flecknoe Fire thy Mind with Praise, And Uncle Ogleby1 thy Envy raise; Thou art my Blood where Johnson hath no Part, What share have we in Nature, or in Art? Where did his Wit or Learning fix a Brand? Or rail at Arts he did not understand? Where made he love in Prince Nycanders Vain? Or swept the Dust in Psyches humble Strain?2 Where sold he Bargains? Whip-stich, Kiss mine A—s, Promis’d a Play, and dwindled to a Farce. Where did his Muse from Fletchers Scenes purloin, As thou whole Etheridge dost transfuse to thine? But so transfus’d as Oyls on Water Flow, His always Floats above, thine Sinks Below; This is thy Promise, this thy wondrous Way, New Humours to Invent for each New Play; This is that Boasted Bias of the Mind, By which one way to Dulness ’tis Inclin’d; Which makes thy Writings lame on one side still,

304 BEN JONSON

And in all Charges, that way bends thy will; Nor let thy Mountain Belly make Pretence, Of likeness, thine’s a Tympany of Sence. A Tun of Man in thy large Bulk is Writ, But sure thou art a Kilderkin of Wit; Like mine thy Gentle Numbers feebly creep, Thy Tragick Muse gives Smiles, thy Comick sleep…. (ll. 171–98; pp. 12–13) NOTES 1 John Ogilby (1600–76), a writer and publisher also satirized in The Dunciad in Four Books (1. 141, 328) as a feeble poet. 2 Prince Nicander is a character in Shadwell’s tragedy Psyche (1675).

87. John Oldham on Jonson 1678

‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson. Written in 1678. Ode’, printed in Oldham’s Poems, and Translations (1683). Corrected here from the autograph copy in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson Poetry 123, following H & S, xi, 538–45. Oldham (1653–83) is best known for his Satyrs upon the Jesuits, of which the first —inspired by the Popish Plot— appeared in 1679. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the Satyrs included in Oldham’s Works (1684), he acknowledges a debt to Catiline for the first Satyr: ‘The first Satyr he drew by Sylla’s Ghost in the great Johnson, which may be perceived by some strokes and touches therein, however short they come of the Original’ (Book i, Sig. A2r). Weldon M.Williams, ‘The Influence of Ben Jonson’s Catiline upon John Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits,’ ELH (1944), xi, 38–62, suggests that Jonson’s influence in fact extends over all four of the Satyrs. In the ‘Advertisement’ to Book ii of the Works Oldham acknowledges Jonson as one of his predecessors in translating Horace’s Art of Poetry, one ‘of so establish’d an Authority, that whatever he did is held as Sacred’ (Book ii, Sig. ar). See Introduction, pp. 10, 16. I. Great Thou! whom ’tis a Crime almost to dare to praise, Whose firm establish’d, and unshaken Glories stand, And proudly their own Fame command, Above our pow’r to lessen or to raise, And all, but the few Heirs of thy brave Genius, and thy Bays; Hail mighty Founder of our Stage! for so I dare Entitle thee, nor any modern Censures fear, Nor care what thy unjust Detractors say; They’l say perhaps, that others did Materials bring, That others did the first Foundations lay, And glorious ’twas (we grant) but to begin, But thou alone couldst finish the design, All the fair Model, and the Workmanship was thine: Some bold Advent’rers might have been before, Who durst the unknown world explore, By them it was survey’d at distant view,

306 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

And here and there a Cape, and Line they drew, Which only serv’d as hints, and marks to thee, Who wast reserv’d to make the full Discovery: Art’s Compass to thy painful search we owe, Whereby thou went’st so far, and we may after go, By that we may Wit’s vast, and trackles Ocean try, Content no longer, as before, Dully to coast along the shore, But steer a course more unconfm’d, and free, Beyond the narrow bounds, that pent Antiquity. II.

Never till thee the Theater possest A Prince with equal Pow’r, and Greatness blest, No Government, or Laws it had To strengthen, and establish it, Till thy great hand the Scepter sway’d, But groan’d under a wretched Anarchy of Wit: Unform’d, and void was then its Poesie, Only some pre-existing Matter we Perhaps could see, That might foretell what was to be; A rude, and undigested Lump it lay, Like the old Chaos, e’re the birth of Light, and Day, Till thy brave Genius like a new Creator came, And undertook the mighty Frame; No shuffled Atoms did the well-built work compose, It from no lucky hit of blund’ring Chance arose (As some of this great Fabrick idly dream) But wise, all-seeing Judgment did contrive, And knowing Art its Graces give: No sooner did thy Soul with active Force and Fire The dull and heavy Mass inspire, But strait throughout it let us see Proportion, Order, Harmony, And every part did to the whole agree, And strait appear’d a beauteous new-made world of Poetry. III.

Let dull, and ignorant Pretenders Art condemn (Those only Foes to Art, and Art to them) The meer Fanaticks, and Enthusiasts in Poetry (For Schismaticks in that, as in Religion be) Who make’t all Revelation, Trance, and Dream, Let them despise her Laws, and think That Rules and Forms the Spirit stint: Thine was no mad, unruly Frenzy of the brain,

BEN JONSON 307

Which justly might deserve the Chain, ’Twas brisk, and mettled, but a manag’d Rage, Sprightly as vig’rous Youth, and cool as temp’rate Age: Free, like thy Will, it did all Force disdain, But suffer’d Reason’s loose, and easie rein, By that it suffer’d to be led, Which did not curb Poetick liberty, but guide: Fancy, that wild and haggard Faculty, Untam’d in most, and let at random fly, Was wisely govern’d, and reclaim’d by thee, Restraint, and Discipline was made endure, And by thy calm, and milder Judgment brought to lure; Yet when ’twas at some nobler Quarry sent, With bold, and tow’ring wings it upward went, Not lessen’d at the greatest height, Not turn’d by the most giddy flights of dazling Wit. IV.

Nature, and Art together met, and joyn’d, Made up the Character of thy great Mind. That like a bright and glorious Sphere, Appear’d with numerous Stars embellish’d o’re, And much of Light to thee, and much of Influence bore, This was the strong Intelligence, whose pow’r Turn’d it about, and did th’ unerring motions steer: Concurring both like vital Seed, and Heat, The noble Births they joyntly did beget, And hard ’twas to be thought, Which most of force to the great Generation brought: So mingling Elements compose our Bodies frame, Fire, Water, Earth, and Air Alike their just Proportions share, Each undistinguish’d still remains the same, Yet can’t we say that either’s here, or there, But all, we know not how, are scatter’d every where. V.

Sober, and grave was still the Garb thy Muse put on, No tawdry careless slattern Dress, Nor starch’d, and formal with Affectedness, Nor the cast Mode, and Fashion of the Court, and Town;

308 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

But neat, agreeable, and janty ’twas, Well-fitted, it sate close in every place, And all became with an uncommon Air, and Grace: Rich, costly and substantial was the stuff, Not barely smooth, nor yet too coarsly rough: No refuse, ill-patch’d Shreds o’th Schools, The motly wear of read, and learned Fools, No French Commodity which now so much does take, And our own better Manufacture spoil, Nor was it ought of forein Soil; But Staple all, and all of English Growth, and Make: What flow’rs soe’re of Art it had, were found No tinsel’d slight Embroideries, But all appear’d either the native Ground, Or twisted, wrought, and interwoven with the Piece. VI.

Plain Humor, shewn with her whole various Face, Not mask’d with any antick Dress, Not screw’d in forc’d, ridiculous Grimace (The gaping Rabbles dull delight, And more the actor’s than the Poet’s Wit) Such did she enter on thy Stage, And such was represented to the wond’ring Age: Well wast thou skill’d, and read in human kind, In every wild fantastick Passion of his mind, Didst into all his hidden Inclinations dive, What each from Nature does receive, Or Age, or Sex, or Quality, or Country give; What Custom too, that mighty Sorceress, Whose pow’rful Witchcraft does transform Enchanted Man to several monstrous Images, Makes this an odd, and freakish Monky turn, And that a grave and solemn Ass appear, And all a thousand beastly shapes of Folly wear: Whate’re Caprice or Whimsie leads awry Perverted, and seduc’d Mortality, Or does incline, and byass it From what’s Discreet, and Wise, and Right, and Good, and Fit; All in thy faithful Glass were so express’d, As if they were Reflections of thy Breast,

BEN JONSON 309

As if they had been stamp’d on thy own mind, And thou the universal vast Idea of Mankind. VII.

Never didst thou with the same Dish repeated cloy, Tho every Dish, well-cook’d by thee, Contain’d a plentiful Variety To all that could sound relishing Palats be, Each Regale with new Delicacies did invite, Courted the Tast, and rais’d the Appetite: Whate’re fresh dainty Fops in season were To garnish, and set out thy Bill of fare (Those never found to fail throughout the year, For seldom that ill natur’d Planet rules, That plagues a Poet with a dearth of Fools) What thy strict Observation e’re survey’d, From the fine, luscious Spark of high, and courtly Breed, Down to the dull, insipid Cit, Made thy pleas’d Audience entertainment fit, Serv’d up with all the grateful Poignancies of Wit. VIII.

Most Plays are writ like Almanacks of late, And serve one only year, one only State; Another makes them useless, stale, and out of date; But thine were wisely calculated fit For each Meridian, every Clime of Wit, For all succeeding Time, and after-age, And all Mankind might thy vast Audience sit, And the whole world be justly made thy Stage: Still they shall taking be, and ever new, Still keep in vogue in spite of all the damning Crew; Till the last Scene of this great Theatre, Clos’d, and shut down, The numerous Actors all retire, And the grand Play of human Life be done. IX.

Beshrew those envious Tongues, who seek to blast thy Bays, Who Spots in thy bright Fame would find, or raise, And say, it only shines with borrow’d Rays; Rich in thy self, to whose unbounded store Exhausted Nature could vouchsafe no more, Thou could’st alone the Empire of the Stage

310 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

maintain, Couldst all its Grandeur, and its Port sustain, Nor neededst others Subsidies to pay, Neededst no Tax on forein, or thy native Country lay, To bear the charges of thy purchas’d Fame, But thy own Stock could raise the same, Thy sole Revenue all the vast Expence defray: Yet like some mighty Conqueror in Poetry, Design’d by Fate of choice to be Founder of its new universal Monarchy, Boldly thou didst the learned World invade, Whilst all around thy pow’rful Genius sway’d, Soon vanquish’d Rome, and Greece were made submit, Both were thy humble Tributaries made, And thou return’dst in Triumph with their captive Wit. X.

Unjust, and more ill-natur’d those, Thy spiteful, and malicious Foes, Who on thy happiest Talent fix a lye, And call that Slowness, which was Care, and Industry. Let me (with Pride so to be guilty thought) Share all thy wish’d Reproach, and share thy shame, If Diligence be deem’d a fault, If to be faultless must deserve their Blame: Judg of thy self alone (for none there were Could be so just, or could be so severe) Thou thy own Works didst strictly try By known and uncontested Rules of Poetry, And gav’st thy Sentence still impartially: With rigor thou arraign’dst each guilty Line, And spar’dst no criminal Sense, because ’twas thine: Unbrib’d with Favour, Love, or Self-conceit, (For never, or too seldom we, Objects too near us, our own Blemishes can see) Thou didst no small’st Delinquencies acquit, But saw’st them to Correction all submit, Saw’st execution done on all convicted Crimes of Wit. XI.

BEN JONSON 311

Some curious Painter, taught by Art to dare (For they with Poets in that Title share) When he would undertake a glorious Frame Of lasting Worth, and fadeless as his Fame; Long he contrives, and weighs the bold Design, Long holds his doubting hand e’re he begin, And justly then proportions every stroke, and line, And oft he brings it to review, And oft he does deface, and dashes oft anew, And mixes Oyls to make the flitting Colours dure, To keep ’em from the tarnish of injurious Time secure; Finish’d at length in all that Care, and Skill can do The matchless Piece is set to publick View, And all surpriz’d about it wond’ring stand, And tho no name be found below, Yet strait discern th’unimitable hand, And strait they cry ’tis Titian, or ’tis Angelo: So thy brave Soul, that scorn’d all cheap, and easie ways, And trod no common road to Praise, Would not with rash, and speedy Negligence proceed, (For who e’re saw Perfection grow in haste? Or that soon done, which must for ever last?) But gently did advance with wary heed, And shew’d that mastery is most in justness read: Nought ever issued from thy teeming Breast, But what had gone full time, could write exactly best, And stand the sharpest Censure, and defie the rigid’st Test. XII.

‘Twas thus th’Almighty Poet (if we dare Our weak, and meaner Acts with his compare) When he the Worlds fair Poem did of old design, That Work, which now must boast no longer date than thine; Tho ’twas in him alike to will, and do, Tho the same Word that spoke, could make it too, Yet would he not such quick, and hasty methods use, Nor did an instant (which it might) the great effect produce, But when th’ All-wise himself in Council sate, Vouchsaf’d to think and be deliberate,

312 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

When Heaven consider’d, and th’Eternal Wit, and Sense, Seem’d to take time, and care, and pains, It shew’d that some uncommon Birth, That something worthy of a God was coming forth; Nought uncorrect there was, nought faulty there, No point amiss did in the large voluminous Piece appear, And when the glorious Author all survey’d, Survey’d whate’re his mighty Labours made, Well-pleas’d he was to find All answer’d the great Model, and Idea of his Mind Pleas’d at himself He in high wonder stood, And much his Power, and much his Wisdom did applaud, To see how all was Perfect, all transcendent Good. XIII.

Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame, Content on gross and coarse Applause to live, And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give, Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn, Nor would’st that wretched Alms receive, The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name: Thine was no empty Vapor, rais’d beneath, And form’d of common Breath, The false, and foolish Fire, that’s whisk’d about By popular Air, and glares a while, and then goes out; But ’twas a solid, whole and perfect Globe of light, That shone all over, was all over bright, And dar’d all sullying Clouds, and fear’d no darkning night; Like the gay Monarch of the Stars and Sky, Who wheresoe’re he does display His sovereign Lustre, and majestick Ray, Strait all the less, and petty Glories nigh Vanish, and shrink away, O’rewhelm’d, and swallow’d by the greater blaze of Day; With such a strong, an awful and victorious Beam Appear’d, and ever shall appear, thy Fame, View’d, and ador’d by all th’ undoubted Race of Wit, Who only can endure to look on it.

BEN JONSON 313

The rest o’recome with too much light, With too much brightness dazled, or extinguish’d quite: Restless, and uncontroul’d it now shall pass As wide a course about the World as he, And when his long repeated Travels cease Begin a new, and vaster Race, And still tread round the endless Circle of Eternity. (69–86)

314

88. John Dryden, low farce in Volpone 1683

From the portions added by Dryden to Sir William Soame’s translation of Boileau’s L’Art Poétique, The Art of Poetry (1683). A note to Jacob Tonson’s 1708 edition of the translation states that the idea of giving examples from English writers was Dryden’s, as was its execution (the note is reprinted in Macdonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography, p. 36). Soame had apparently asked Dryden to revise his translation. The extract below is from Canto iii; it corresponds to Chant iii, ll. 389–400 in the original. Your Actors must by Reason be control’d; Let young men speak like young, old men like old: Observe the Town, and study well the Court; For thither various Characters resort: Thus ’twas great Johnson purchas’d his renown, And in his Art had born away the Crown; If less desirous of the Peoples praise, He had not with low Farce debas’d his Playes; Mixing dull Buffoonry with Wit refin’d, And Harlequin with noble Terence joyn’d. When in the Fox I see the Tortois hist, I lose the Author of the Alchymist. (51–2)

316

89. Edward Howard on Jonson’s allegory and on a statue of Jonson 1689

From Edward Howard, Caroloiades, Or, The Rebellion of Forty One. In Ten Books. A Heroick Poem (1689). For Howard, see No. 78, above. (a) From the preface. [Howard’s preface defends the fictional elements which must be added to the ‘known story’ to make a proper epic. He has just cited Tasso’s inclusion in Gerusalemme Liberata of supernatural characters and events.] And this our famous Ben. Johnson well understood, whose mature Judgement gave as little room to extravagancies of the Brain as any that preceded him, by his introducing Sylla’s Ghost whereby to infuse on the wicked Genius of Cataline a more Hellish and Irresistable Temptation of perfect his Impious design, which could not have been so execrably Insinuated by any other Method. An example that enough assures us that he approv’d the Allegorical part of Invention, and that it is as Legitimately ours, as it could be claim’d by any of the Ancients, when properly apply’d. I held it convenient to instance these particulars, that the Reader may not wonder if I have in some passages and fictions follow’d the example of so great a Poet, as well as others that famously preceded him in that manner of Contrivement. (Sig. A4v– [A5]r) (b) From Book v.

[The hero Dornland has visited the wise Polyaster to learn the truth of a prophecy made about him; Polyaster first shows him a pantheon in wood and stone of the most learned of the British; among the poets Chaucer and Spenser are the first.] Near these in Statue witty Shakspere stood, Whose early Plays were soonest next to Good. And Like a vast Dramatick Founder show’d Bounties of Wit from his large Genius flow’d. Whose worth was by this Learned duely weigh’d,

318 BEN JONSON

As in Effigie there he stood display’d. But more stupendious to his Soul appear’d Proportions which great Johnsons Form declar’d, Whose deep Effigies he wish’d longer date Then Polish’d art in stone cou’d Celebrate. Admiring next the wit that Crown’d his Bays, Whose Scenes were works, when most fell short of Plays. So aptly by him Characters exprest, That shew’d his artfull hand and Learning best. Whilst other Dramaticks like Planets were, Rambling to find their Center near his Sphere. A Province Phœbus did on him bestow, When made his Wits Lieutenancy below. (137–8)

90. Gerald Langbaine, notes on Jonson 1691

From Gerald Langbaine the younger, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford 1691). Langbaine (1656–92) was the son of a Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford; in 1687 he published Momus Triumphant: or, the Plagiaries of the English Stage (also published with the title A New Catalogue of English Plays), a listing of plays by author with comments on their sources, including instances of what Langbaine in his preface calls ‘Thefts’ or ‘Plagiaries’ (Sig. [A4v]). Here, as in the 1691 Account, he distinguishes between the ancients’ methods of borrowing—they used their prede cessors as models, not just as quarries; they took only the best from their sources; and they acknowledged their borrowings—from those of certain moderns, and especially of Dryden. Whereas Shakespeare and Jonson borrowed from the ancients to provide plots and to beautify the language, Langbaine says, writers like Dryden serve up ‘empty French Kickshaws’ as their own creations, while at the same time pouring scorn on French wit, and condemning predecessors like Jonson for their borrowings (Sig. ar–a2r). The Jonson listing notes classical sources for Catiline, Poetaster, Epicoene, and Sejanus (pp. 12–13), notes which form the basis for the comments on sources in the 1691 Account. Langbaine’s 1691 work, from which extracts are given here, is far more than a catalogue, offering brief biographies of his playwrights, miscellaneous verse and prose excerpts relating to their works and reputations, and lists of the playwrights’ known plays with details from their title-pages and an occasional additional comment. Copies of the Account annotated by successors like Bishop Percy, William Oldys, Steevens, and Malone, have themselves become important sources for literary history. (a) From the entry on Dryden. But to wave this digression, and proceed to the Vindication of the Ancients; which that I may the better perform, for the Readers Diversion, and that Mr. Dryden may not tell me, that what I have said is but gratis dictum, I shall set down the Heads of his Depositions against our ancient English Poets, and then endeavour the Defence of those great Men, who certainly deserv’d much better of posterity, than to be disrespectively treated as he has used them. (134) ⋆⋆⋆

320 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

[Having dealt with Dryden’s comments on Shakespeare, and on Fletcher, Langbaine quotes Dryden’s ‘Defence of the Epilogue’ (No. 82 (c), above) to show how he praises Jonson in one page, and ‘wipes it out in another’ (p. 136); he defends first Shakespeare and Fletcher, then Jonson.] To come lastly to Ben Johnson, who (as Mr. Dryden affirms,⋆) has borrow’d more from the Ancients than any: I crave leave to say in his behalf, that our late Laureat has far out-done him in Thefts, proportionable to his Writings: and therefore he is guilty of the highest Arrogance, to accuse another of a Crime, for which he is of most men liable to be arraign’d. Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querenteis?1 I must further alledge that Mr. Johnson in borrowing from the Ancients, has only follow’d the Pattern of the great Men of former Ages, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Plautus, Terence, Seneca, &c. all which have imitated the Example of the industrious Bee, which sucks Honey from all sorts of Flowers, and lays it up in a general Repository. [Describes how all these authors borrowed from their predecessors.] ⋆⋆⋆ I could enumerate more Instances, but these are sufficient Precedents to excuse Mr. Johnson. Permit me to say farther in his behalf, That if in imitation of these illustrious Examples, and Models of Antiquity, he has borrow’d from them, as they from each other; yet that he attempted, and as some think, happily succeeded in his Endeavours of surpassing them: inasmuch that a certain Person of Quality† makes a Question, ‘Whether any of the Wit of the Latine Poets be more Terse and Eloquent in their Tongue, than this Great and Learned Poet appears in ours.’ Whether Mr. Dryden, who has likewise succeeded to admiration in this way, or Mr. Johnson have most improv’d, and best advanc’d what they have borrow’d from the Ancients, I shall leave to the decision of the abler Criticks: only this I must say, in behalf of the later, that he has no ways endeavour’d to conceal what he has borrow’d, as the former has generally done. Nay, in his Play call’d Sejanus he has printed in the Margent throughout, the places from whence he borrow’d: the same he has practic’d in several of his Masques, (as the Reader may find in his Works;) a Pattern, which Mr. Dryden would have done well to have copied, and had thereby sav’d me the trouble of these following Annotations. There is this difference between the Proceedings of these Poets, that Mr. Johnson has by Mr. Dryden’s Concession‡ Design’d his Plots himself; whereas I know not any One Play, whose Plot may be said to be the Product of Mr. Dryden’s own Brain. When Mr. Johnson borrow’d, ’twas from the Treasury of the Ancients, which is so far from any diminution of his Worth, that I think it is to his Honor; at least-wise I am sure he is justified by his Son Cartwright in the following Lines… [Quotes ll. 127–42 from Cartwright’s elegy in Jonsonus Virbius, No. 49(i), above, and attacks Dryden for borrowing not only from the ancients but also from the Italians, the Spanish, the French and even from his own countrymen, but reserves detailed comment for his accounts of individual plays.]

BEN JONSON 321

⋆⋆⋆ …in the mean time, give me leave to say a word, or two, in Defence of Mr. Johnson’s way of Wit, which Mr. Dryden calls Clenches. There have been few great Poets which have not propos’d some Eminent Author for their Pattern, (Examples of this would be needless and endless.) Mr. Johnson propos’d Plautus for his Model, and not only borrow’d from him, but imitated his way of Wit in English. There are none who have read him, but are acquainted with his way of playing with Words: I will give one Example for all. which the Reader may find in the very entrance of his Works; I mean the Prologue to Amphitruo. Justam rem & facilem oratum a vobis volo: Nam juste ab justis sum Orator datus. Nam injusta ab justis impetrare non decet: Justa autem ab injustis petere insipientia ’st.2 Nor might this be the sole Reason for Mr. Johnson’s Imitation, for possibly ’twas his Compliance with the Age that induc’d him to this way of writing, it being then as Mr. Dryden observes$ the Mode of Wit, the Vice of the Age, and not Ben Johnson’s: and besides Mr. Dryden’s taxing Sir Philip Sidney for playing with his Words, I may add that I find it practis’d by several Drammatick Poets, who were Mr. Johnson’s Cotemporaries: and not withstanding the Advantage which this Age claims over the last, we find Mr. Dryden himself as well as Mr. Johnson, not only given to Clinches; but sometimes a Carwichet, a Quarter-Quibble, or a bare Pun serves his turn, as well as his friend Bur in his Wild-Gallant; and therefore he might have spar’d this Reflection, if he had given himself the liberty of Thinking. As to his Reflections on this Triumvirate in general: I might easily prove, that his Improprieties in Grammar, are equal to theirs: and that He himself has been guilty of Solecisms in Speech, and flaws in Sence, as well as Shakespear, Fletcher, and Johnson: but this would be to waste Paper and Time…. (145–51) (b) From the article on Jonson.

I have already drawn some strokes of this Great Man’s Character, in my Defence of him against the Attempts of Mr. Dryden; and therefore shall less need to make a curious and exact Description of all his Excellencies; which otherwise are very Great, Noble, and Various; and have been remark’d in parcells by several Hands, but exceed my small Capacity to collect them into one full View. I shall therefore rather let them lye dispers’d, as Scaliger did Virgil’s praises, thro’ his whole Book of Poetry; contenting my self at present with giving the Reader an Account of the private occurrences of his Life. [Gives brief biography.] ⋆⋆⋆ He was a Man of a very free Temper, and withal blunt, and somewhat haughty to those, that were either Rivals in Fame, or Enemies to his Writings: (witness his Poetaster, wherein he falls upon Decker, and his answer to Dr. Gill, who writ against his Magnetic Lady,) otherwise of a good Sociable Humour, when amongst his Sons and Friends in the Apollo: from whose Laws the Reader may possibly judge of his Temper….

322 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

[Quotes Jonson’s Leges Conviviales; refrains from giving any judgement on Jonson’s poetry, since it deserves ‘somewhat above what my faint Praise can reach, or describe’, referring the reader to Fuller and Anthony à Wood in prose, and Cartwright and Oldham in verse.] ⋆⋆⋆ …to the foregoing, I might add Mr. Dryden’s Dramatick Essay, which had it been writ after his Postscript to Granada, might have atoned for that unbecoming Character, and had serv’d for a Palinode; but since he has not that I know of thought fit to retract it, give me leave to insert an old Copy of Verses, which seems to wipe off the Accusations of Mr. Johnson’s Enemies. [Quotes Fitzgeffrey’s Latin epigram in praise of Jonson (No. 8, above). Then after resisting the temptation to retail a ‘pleasant Story or two’ about Jonson for fear of Dryden’s condemnation, Langbaine gives a catalogue of the plays and masques.] (281–7) ⋆⋆⋆ [From the notes on Catiline:] This Play is still in Vogue on the Stage, and always presented with success. It was so well approv’d of by the Judicious Beaumont, that he writ a Copy of Verses in praise of it, which the Reader may find before our Authors Works. Nevertheless I must take notice that Mr. Johnson has borrow’d very much from the Ancients in this Tragedy; as for Instance, part of Sylla’s Ghost, in the very Entrance of the Play, is copy’d from the Ghost of Tantalus, in the beginning of Seneca’s Thyestes. Thus our Author has translated a great part of Salust’s History, (tho’ with great Judgement and Elegance) and inserted it into his Play. For the Plot, see Salust. Plutarch in the Life of Cicero. Florus Lib. 4 C. 1. (288) [From the notes on The Devil is an Ass:] Tho’ our Author seldome borrows any part of his Plot; yet in this Play, if I mistake not, Wittipol’s giving his cloak to Fitz-dotterel to court his Wife one quarter of an Hour, is founded on a Novel in Boccace, Day 3. Nov 5. (289) [From the notes on Poetaster:] …I must further add, I heartily wish for our Author’s Reputation, that he had not been the Agressor in this Quarrel; but being altogether ignorant of the Provocations given him, I must suspend my Judgment, and leave it to better Judges to determine the Controversy. Our Author has adorn’d this play with several Translations from the Ancients, as Ovid Amor. lib. 1 Eleg. 15. Horatii Sat. lib. 1. Sat. 9. lib. 2. Sat. 1. Virgilii Aeneid. lib. 4. with others. (294–5) [From the notes on Epicoene:]

BEN JONSON 323

Part of this Play is borrow’d from the Ancients, as Act 1. Sc. 1. part from Ovid de Arte Amandi. Act 2. Sc. 2. part from Juvenal. Sat. 6. Act 2. Sc. 5. part from Plautus’s Aulularia Act. 3. Sc. 5. with other passages. Notwithstanding which, this Play is Accounted by all, One of the best Comedies we have extant; and those who would know more, may be amply satisfied by the perusal of the Judicious Examen of this Play made by Mr. Dryden.|| (296) [From the notes on The Staple of News:] The Author introduces four Gossips on the Stage, who continue during the Action, and criticise on the Play. This was practised more than once; witness, Every Man out of his Humor, and Magnetick Lady: and herein he was follow’d by Fletcher…in his Knight of the Burning-pestle. (297) [From the notes on Volpone:] This Play is writ in Imitation of the Comedy of the Ancients, and the Argument is form’d into an Acrostick, like those of Plautus, which are said to be writ by Priscian, or some other Eminent Grammarian. It is still in vogue at the Theatre in Dorset-Garden, and its value is sufficiently manifested by the verses of Mr. Beaumont, and Dr. Donne. (297–8) [From the notes on The Case is Altered:] …a pleasant Comedy…. In this Comedy our Author hath very much made use of Plautus, as the Learned Reader may observe by comparing His Aulularia, and Capteivei, with this Comedy. (298) [Langbaine’s catalogue of the plays and masques ends with The New Inn, after which he quotes Jonson’s ‘Ode to Himself’.] This Ode sufficiently shews what a high Opinion our Author has of his own Performances; and like Aristotle in Philosophy, and Peter Lombard (The Master of the Sentences) in SchoolDivinity; our Ben. lookt upon himself as the only Master of Poetry; and thought it the Duty of the Age, rather to submit to, than dispute, much less oppose his Judgement. ’Twas great pity, that he that was so great a Master in Poetry, should not retain that old Axiom in Morality, Nosce Teipsunt…. He had then prevented that sharp reply made by the Ingenious Mr. Feltham, to this Magisterial Ode; and which could not chuse but vex a Person of our Author’s Haughty Temper: but he was a Man, and subject to Infirmities, as well as others; tho’ abating for his too much abounding in his own Sence, (an Epidemical Distemper belonging to the Fraternity of Parnassus) he had not his Equal in his time for Poetry. Having presented the Reader with Mr. Johnson’s Ode, it may not be improper for me perhaps to transcribe, nor unpleasant to him, to peruse Mr. Feltham’s Answer. [Prints Felltham’s ‘Answer to the Ode’: see No. 36(d), above.] ⋆⋆⋆ This Haughty Humour of Mr. Johnson was blam’d, and carpt at by other, as well as Mr. Feltham: amongst the rest, Sir John Suckling, that Neat Facetious Wit, arraign’d him at the

324 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Sessions of Poets;¶ and had a fling at this Play [i.e. The New Inn]: tho’ we may say, compar’d to the former, He did only circum praecordia ludere;3 laugh at, and railly his unreasonable Self-opinion; as you may see in the following Lines…. [Quotes them.] (301–4) (c) From the article on Shakespeare. ’Tis true Mr. Dryden⋆⋆ has censured him very severely, in his Postscript to Granada, but in cool Blood, and when the Enthusiastick Fit was past, he has acknowledged him (in his Dramatick Essay) Equal at least, if not Superiour, to Mr. Johnson in Poesie. I shall not here repeat what has been before urged in his behalf, in that Common Defence of the Poets of that Time against Mr. Dryden’s Account of Ben Johnson; but shall take the Liberty to speak my Opinion, as my predecessors have done, of his Works; which is this, That I esteem his Plays beyond any that have ever been published in our Language: and tho’ I extreamly admire Johnson, and Fletcher, yet I must still aver, that when in competition with Shakespear, I must apply to them what Justus Lipsius writ in his Letter to Andraeas Schottus, concerning Terence and Plautus, when compar’d; Terentium amo, admiror, sed Plautum magis.4 (454) NOTES • † ‡ $ || ¶ •• 1 2

Pref. Mock Astrol. [No. 76, above]. Poems and Essays, By Mr. Edw. Howard, p. 24 [No. 84, above]. Pref. Mock Astrol. [No. 76, above]. Postscript to Granada, p. 148 [No. 82(c), above]. Dramatick Essay, p. 50 [No. 67, above]. Suckling’s Poems, p. 7 [No. 45, above.]. See Mr. Dryden’s Account [No. 82(c), above]. ‘Who could endure the Gracchi railing at sedition’: Juvenal, Satires, 2.24. ‘It is a just and trifling request I wish you to grant: for I am sent as a just pleader pleading with the just for what is just. It would be unfitting, of course, for unjust favours to be obtained from the just, while looking for just treatment from the unjust is folly’: Amphitruo, prologue, ll. 33–6. 3 ‘Sport with his feelings’. 4 ‘I love Terence, admire him, but Plautus more.’

91. Thomas Rymer on Catiline 1692

From A Short View of Tragedy (1692). Rymer (? 1643–1713) was at Cambridge as late as 1662, though there is no record of his having taken a degree. He first appeared as a critic in the long preface to his translation of Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (1674). There he comments that while in the earlier part of the century criticism flourished in France, in England ‘many great Wits flourished, but Ben Johnson, I think, had all the Critical learning to himself; and till of late years England was as free from criticks, as it is from Wolves, that a harmless well-meaning Book might pass without any danger’ (Sig. A3v). In 1677 he published his own heroic tragedy, Edgar, and his commentary on The Tragedies of the Last Age. A Short View of Tragedy followed in 1692; in the same year, on the death of Shadwell, Rymer became historiographer royal, and began his monumental collection of records of treaties entered into by the English crown, Foedera, which occupied him up to his death. At the beginning of The Tragedies of the Last Age Rymer had announced that he would examine ‘the choicest and most applauded English Tragedies of this last age’, listing Rollo, A King and No King, The Maid’s Tragedy (all by Fletcher or Beaumont and Fletcher), Othello, Julius Caesar, and Catiline (pp. 1–2). Having dealt with the first three, he finds he has made up a volume, but promises comments on the rest, with some reflections on Paradise Lost (pp. 141, 143). Meanwhile he closes by anticipating what he wishes to say on behalf of Catiline: …that though the contrivance and œconomy is faulty enough, yet we there find (besides what is borrow’d from others) more of Poetry and good thought, more of Nature and of Tragedy, then peradventure can be scrap’t together from all those other Plays. Nor can I be displeas’d with honest Ben, when he rather chooses to borrow a Melon of his Neighbour, than to treat us with a Pumpion of his own growth, (p. 143) In A Short View of Tragedy Rymer keeps his promise to give a critical account of Othello—this occupies about a third of the volume—but his comments on Catiline are briefer, and less admiring, than the remarks in The Tragedies of the Last Age would lead one to expect. Jonson, in Rymer’s modified view, shares the absurdities of the drama of his age rather than serves as an exception to them. He is grouped with Shakespeare in following less fortunate models than Gorboduc, and with Shakespeare and Fletcher in offering ‘bloody spectacles’ in tragedy (pp. 84–5). The

326 BEN JONSON

Alchemist may ‘give some shadow’ of The Clouds, but nowhere in English drama is there as much of Aristophanes’ spirit as in Rabelais (p. 24). Remarking on the idle raptures men of business are made to spout in Shakespeare, Rymer adds: ‘It was then a strange imagination in Ben. Johnson, to go stuff out a Play with Tully’s Orations’ (p. 6). His extended treatment of Catiline begins with a contrast with Shakespeare to Jonson’s advantage, but quickly turns to the absurdities Rymer perceives in the play. To gain attention Aristotle told us, it was necessary that an Orator be a good Man; therefore he that writes Tragedy should be careful that the persons of his Drama, be of consideration and importance, that the Audience may readily lend an Ear, and give attention to what they say, and act. Who would thrust into a crowd to hear what Mr. Iago, Roderigo, or Cassio, is like to say? From a Venetian Senate, or a Roman Senate one might expect great matters: But their Poet was out of sorts; he had it not for them; the Senators must be no wiser than other folk. Ben. Johnson, knew to distinguish men and manners, at an other rate. In Catiline we find our selves in Europe, we are no longer in the Land of Savages, amongst Blackamoors, Barbarians, and Monsters. The Scene is Rome and first on the Stage appears Sylla’s Ghost. Dost thou not feel me, Rome? Not yet? [I. 1] One would, in reason, imagine the Ghost is in some publick open place, upon some Eminence, where Rome is all within his view: But it is a surprizing thing to find that this ratling Rodomontade speech is in a dark, close, private sleeping hole of Catiline’s. Yet the Chorus, is of all wonders the strangest. The Chorus is always present on the Stage, privy to, and interessed in all that passes, and thereupon make their Reflections to Conclude the several Acts. Sylla’s Ghost, tho never so big, might slide in at the Key-hole; but how comes the Chorus into Catilins Cabinet? Aurelia is soon after with him too, but the Poet had perhaps provided her some Trucklebed in a dark Closet by him. In short, it is strange that Ben, who understood the turn of Comedy so well; and had found the success, should thus grope in the dark, and jumble things together without head or tail, without any rule or proportion, without any reason or design. Might not the Acts of the Apostles, or a Life in Plutarch, be as well Acted, and as properly called a Tragedy, as any History of a Conspiracy? Corneille tells us, in the Examen of his Melite, that when first he began to write, he thought there had been no Rules: So had no guide but a little Common sence, with the Example of Mr. Hardy, and some other, not more regular than he. This Common sence (says he) which was all my rule, brought me to find out the unity of Action to imbroyl four Lovers by one and the same intreague.1 Ben. Johnson, besides his Common sence to tell him that the Unity of Action was necessary; had stumbl’d (I know not how) on a Chorus; which is not to be drawn through a Key-hole, to be lugg’d about, or juggl’d with an hocus pocus hither and thither; nor stow’d in a garret, nor put into quarters with the Breentford Army [of The Rehearsal], so must of necessity keep the Poet to unity of place; And also to some Conscionable time, for the representation: Because the Chorus is not to be trusted out of sight, is not to eat or drink till they have given up their Verdict, and the Plaudite is over.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 327

One would not talk of rules, or what is regular with Shakespear, or any followers, in the Gang of the Strouling Fraternity; but it is lamentable that Ben. Johnson, his Stone and his Tymber, however otherwise of value, must lye a miserable heap of ruins, for want of Architecture, or some Son of Vitruvius, to joyn them together. He had read Horace, had Translated that to the Pisones: Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus interpres. —2 Ben. —Being a Poet, thou may’st feign, create, Not care, as thou wouldst faithfully translate, To render word for word— And this other precept. Nec circa vilem, patulumque morabe[r]is Orbem.3 Ben. —The vile, broad-trodden ring forsake. What is there material in this Catiline, either in the Manners, in the. Thoughts, or in the Expression, (three parts of Tragedy) which is not word for word translation? In the Fable, or Plot (which is the first, and principal part) what see we, but the vile broad trodden ring? Vile, Horace calls it, as a thing below, and too mean for any man of wit to busie his head withal. Patulum, he calls it, because it is obvious, and easie for any body to do as much as that comes to. ’Tis but to plodd along, step by step in the same tract: ’Tis drudgery only for the blind Horse in a Mill. No Creature sound of Wind and Limb, but would chuse a nobler Field, and a more generous Career. Homer, we find, slips sometime into a Tract of Scripture, but his Pegasus is not stabl’d there, presently up he springs, mounts aloft, is on the wing, no earthly bounds, or barriers to confine him. For Ben, to sin thus against the clearest light and conviction, argues a strange stupidity: It was bad enough in him, against his Judgment and Conscience, to interlard so much fiddle-faddle, Comedy, and Apocryphal matters in the History: Because, forsooth, —his nam plebecula gaudet.4 Where the Poet has chosen a subject of importance sufficient and proper for Tragedy, there is no room for this petty interlude and diversion. Had some Princes come express from Salankemen (remote as it is) to give an account of the battel, whilst the story was hot and new, and made a relation accurate, and distinctly, with all the pomp, and advantage of the Theatre, wou’d the Audience have suffer’d a Tumbler or Baboon, a Bear, or Rope dancer to have withdrawn their attention; or to have interrupted the Narrative; tho’ it had held as long as a Dramatick Representation. Nor at that time wou’d they thank a body for his quibbles, or wit out of season: This mans Feather, or that Captains Embroidered Coat might not be touched upon but in a very short Parenthesis. (158–64) NOTES 1 Pierre Corneille, Writings on the Theatre, ed. H.T.Barnwell (Oxford 1965), p. 80. Alexandra Hardy (? 1569–1632) wrote numerous tragedies and tragi-comedies. 2 ‘Do not seek to render word for word as a slavish translator’: Horace, Ars Poetica, ll. 133–4. 3 ‘Do not linger along the easy and open pathway’: Ars Poetica, l. 132. 4 ‘’Tis in such things the rabble delights’: Horace, Epistolae, 2.1.186.

328

92. Nahum Tate, farce in Jonson 1693

From the preface to A Duke and No Duke. Tate (1652–1715) is chiefly remembered for his adaptation of King Lear (1681), which saved Lear at the end of the play and married off Cordelia and Edgar; his version held the stage well into the next century. The farce A Duke and No Duke (adapted from Aston Cokayne’s Trappolin Supposed a Prince) was performed in 1684 and printed the next year; for the 1693 edition, Tate wrote a preface in the form of an ‘Enquiry’ into farce, a subject he says is ignored in Italian and French discussions of the stage, though there is enough for his purpose in the ‘Syntagm. of Marischott’ (Sig. a2r-v): what follows is largely translated from De Personis, et Larvis, Earumque Apud Veteres usu, & origine Syntagmation (1610), by Agesilao Mariscotti, as A.H.Scouten shows in ‘An Italian Source for Nahum Tate’s Defence of Farce’, Italica (1950), xxvii, 238–40. Tate says (following Mariscotti) that he cannot understand why farce is despised; it is a particularly difficult kind of drama to write well, since it takes ‘the best Invention’ to find, and ‘the nicest Judgement’ to manage, those properly farcical departures from the natural and probable which are ‘pleasant in the Representation’ (Sig. [b4]v–cr). Then at the end of his essay he turns to his own examples, including ones taken from Jonson. I would not be a Heretick in Poetry, but Reason and Experience convince us, that the best Comedies of Ben. Johnson are near a-kin to Farce; nay, the most entertaining parts of them are Farce it self. The Alchymist which cannot be read by any sensible Man without Astonishment, is Farce from the opening of the First Scene to the end of the Intreigue. ’Tis Farce, but such Farce as bequeaths that Blessing (pronounced by Horace) on him that shall attempt the like. —Sudet multum frustraq; laboret Ausus idem.1 The whole business is carry’d on with Shuffles, Sham and Banter, to the greatest degree of Pleasantness in the World. For Farce (in the Notion I have of it) may admit of most admirable Plot, as well as subsist sometimes without it. Nay, it has it’s several Species or Distinctions as well as Comedy amongst the Romans Stataria mixta, &c.2 but still ’twas Comedy. So Comedy may admit of Humour, which is a great Province of Farce; but then it might be such Humour as comes within compass of Nature and Probability: For where it exceeds these Bounds it becomes Farce. Which Freedom I would allow a Poet, and

330 BEN JONSON

thank him into the Bargain, provided he has the Judgement so to manage his Excursion, as to heighten my Mirth without too grossly shocking my Senses. [Cites Terence as an instance of pure and therefore ‘exact’ comedy, and Plautus as a comic poet who sometimes allows farce and is therefore ‘pleasant’.] ⋆⋆⋆ Neat Terence, witty Plautus, says our greatest⋆ Maister of Comedy, who scorn’d not to Copy sometimes from the Ancients; yet for one hint he has taken from Terence, he has borrowed three from Plautus. I will instance only that pleasant Passage in his Alchymist, where the Confederates banter and play upon Surly disguised like a Spanish Don, not supposing that he understood them. We find the same Humour in the Pænulus of Plautus, where the old Carthaginian speaks in the Punick language; Milphio a Roman Servant plays the wagg, and drolls upon him, under pretence of interpreting for him; the Stranger suffers him to run himself out of breath with his Ribaldry, and then surprizes him with thundring out as good Latin as the best of them could speak. Vulpone’s playing the Mountebank in the Fox is Farce; and Sir Politick’s turning himself into a Tortoise. This Passage however is undiverting, which proves (as I said) the Nicety of Judgment required in managing Improbabilities. Had this been told to the Audience like other Projects which are only recited, it might have made a pleasant Relation. (Sig. c2v–[c3]v) NOTES • [Inset marginal note:] Ben. Johnson’s Verses on Shakespear. 1 ‘[He] may sweat much and yet toil in vain when attempting the same’: Ars Poetica, l. 241–2. 2 ‘The quiet [kind of comedy], the mixed, etc.’

93. John Dryden, Jonson and Fletcher matched at last 1694

From ‘To my Dear Friend Mr Congreve, on his COMEDY, call’d The DoubleDealer’, printed with the first edition of the play (The Double-Dealer, A Comedy, 1694). Dryden here hails Congreve as the conqueror of ‘the Gyant Race, before the Flood’ —Jonson and Fletcher are named in this extract, and Shakespeare later in the poem—and as his own worthy successor. See Introduction, p. 14. WELL then; the promis’d hour is come at last; The present Age of Wit obscures the past: Strong were our Syres; and as they Fought they Writ, Conqu’ring with force of Arms, and dint of Wit; Theirs was the Gyant Race, before the Flood; And thus, when Charles Return’d, our Empire stood. Like Janus he the stubborn Soil manur’d, With Rules of Husbandry the rankness cur’d: Tam’d us to manners, when the Stage was rude; And boistrous English Wit, with Art indu’d. Our Age was cultivated thus at length; But what we gain’d in skill we lost in strength. Our Builders were, with want of Genius, curst; The second Temple was not like the first: Till You, the best Vitruvius, come at length; Our Beauties equal; but excel our strength. Firm Dorique Pillars found your solid Base: The Fair Corinthian Crowns the higher Space; Thus all below is Strength, and all above is Grace. In easie Dialogue is Fletcher’s Praise: He mov’d the mind, but had not power to raise. Great Johnson did by strength of Judgment please: Yet doubling Fletcher’s Force, he wants his Ease. In differing Tallents both adorn’d their Age; One for the Study, t’other for the Stage. But both to Congreve justly shall submit, One match’d in Judgment, both o’er-match’d in Wit,

332 BEN JONSON

In Him all Beauties of this Age we see; Etherege his Courtship, Southern’s Purity; The Satire, Wit, and Strength of Manly Witcherly. All this in blooming Youth you have Atchiev’d; Now are your foil’d Contemporaries griev’d; So much the sweetness of your manners move, We cannot envy you because we Love. Fabius might joy in Scipio, when he saw A Beardless Consul made against the Law, And joyn his Suffrage to the Votes of Rome; Though He with Hannibal was overcome. Thus old Romano bow’d to Raphel’s Fame; And Scholar to the Youth he taught, became. (ll. 1–40; Sig. a2r-v)

94. Béat Louis de Muralt on Jonson and Molière 1694

From Letters Describing the Character and Customs of the English and French Nations (1726), a translation of Lettres sur les Anglois et les François (1725), by Béat Louis de Muralt. Printed from what is described as the second edition (really a reissue) and to which was added ‘Critical Remarks on the whole Work, by Gentlemen of the English and French Nations’. De Muralt (1665–1749), a Swiss-French writer, was in England in 1694, and the letters apparently date from that year (Nicole Bonvalet, ‘Ben Jonson devant la critique française éclairée’, Les Lettres Romanes (1978), xxxii, 202 and n). (a) From the translator’s ‘Critical remarks’. We indeed esteem Johnson, as a good Writer, and Mr St. Evremont is of our Opinion. No Man hath searched further into humane Nature, or hath better finished the Characters he hath introduced upon the Stage. I own, he knew nothing of Gallantry; but that, as well as all other Faults he is reproached with, must be attributed to the Manners of the Age he lived in. Women began not to appear on the English Stage, till after the Restoration of King Charles II. (16–17) (b) From Letter ii.

Comedy has had its highest Period in England, as well as in France: Ben. Johnson, that lived in the Beginning of this Century, is the Poet that carried it farthest. Let it be him that the English would prefer to Moliere, I agree to it, since they must prefer themselves to the rest of the World on every Subject; we are however obliged to them for making choice of so great a Man to carry away the Prize. But if I might be dispensed with from submitting to the Decision of these Gentlemen, and durst give my Opinion in the Controversy, without running too great a Risque, I would say that Ben. Johnson, tho’ undoubtedly a great Poet in some Respects, is yet inferior to Moliere in many Things. In my Opinion he had less Wit, and was less natural; he was a Stranger to every Kind of Gallantry, he brought a great Number of Mechanicks on the Stage, and among all his Plays there are but three or four very good: He makes a Man hide himself under a great Tortoise Shell, and to pass for the Creature. Whereas the Sack with which they reproach Moliere is seen only in a Farce, and has nothing in it improbable.1 In a Word, he had not Courage enough to attack the Faults of his Country; and it may be well said of him, that he did much good to Comedy, but none to the English. There’s one Thing however to be

334 BEN JONSON

offer’d in his Favour; that Moliere had more proper Materials for the Stage. The Characters in France are general, and comprehend an entire Order or Rank of People; but in England, where every one lives according to his Fancy, the Poet can hardly find any thing but particular Characters, which are very numerous, and can never produce any great Effect. After all, it must be acknowledged that Ben. Johnson was a very judicious Poet, and that he distinguishes and supports his Characters to Admiration, and that his good Plays are excellent in their Kind. But let us drop their good Poets, ’tis not those they set up against Moliere; I am to defend him only against the Poets of our own Days, that dare pretend to excel him…. (19–20) NOTE 1 The translator’s note identifies this as a reference to Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671); in this play, the cunning servant Scapin persuades his enemy Géronte into a sack and beats him, putting on voices to suggest it is Géronte’s other enemies who are attacking him. Boileau, for one, disapproved of this scene (L’Art Poétique, 3.399–400). On the reception of the play, see John T.Stoker (ed.), Les Fourberies de Scapin (1971), pp. 5–8.

95. William Wotton on Jonson’s Grammar 1694, 1697

From his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). Wotton (1666–1727) was the second son of Henry Wotton; an infant prodigy in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he graduated BA from Cambridge in 1679. The Reflections is a contribution to the controversy between the ancients and the moderns, a summary of the achievements and limitations of both. The extract below comes from chapter v, ‘Of Ancient and Modern Grammar’. …in the first place, it ought to be considered, that every Tongue has its own peculiar Form, as well as its proper Words; not communicable to, nor to be regulated by the Analogy of another Language: Wherefore he is the best Grammarian, who is the perfectest Master of the Analogy of the Language which he is about; and gives the truest Rules, by which another Man may learn it. Next, to apply this to our own Tongue, it may be certainly affirmed, that the Grammar of English is so far our own, that Skill in the Learned Languages is not necessary to comprehend it. Ben Johnson was the first Man, that I know of, that did any Thing considerable in it; but Lilly’s Grammar was his Pattern: and for want of Reflecting upon the Grounds of a Language which he understood as well as any Man of his Age, he drew it by Violence to a dead Language that was of a quite different Make; and so left his Work imperfect. (58) [In the second edition (1697), Wotton substitutes the following after ‘that did any Thing considerable in it’:] …but he seems to have been too much possessed with the Analogy of Latin and Greek, to write a perfect Grammar of a Language whose Construction is so vastly different; tho’ he falls into a contrary Fault, when he treats of the English Syntax, where he generally appeals to Chaucer and Gower, who lived before our Tongue had met with any of that Polishing, which, within these last CC Years, has made it appear almost entirely New. (60)

336

96. John Dennis and William Congreve on Jonson’s comedy 1695

An exchange of letters printed in Dennis’s collection of Letters upon Several Occasions (1696), which also included contributions by Dryden and Wycherley. The critic and dramatist John Dennis (1657–1734) began his literary career as a member of Dryden’s circle; his first two comedies draw heavily on Jonson’s humours comedy, as C. B.Graham shows in ‘The Jonsonian Tradition in the Comedies of John Dennis’, Modern Language Notes (1941), lvi, 370–2. William Congreve (1670–1729) had achieved success in 1693 with his first play, The Old Batchelour, and with The Double Dealer (see No. 93, above). In Congreve’s dedication of The Way of the World (1700) he explains that he has attempted to represent ‘an affected Wit’ in the play, alluding briefly to Jonson’s character Truewit as a touchstone for genuine wit: some of the audience for his play, he says, needed the leisure of two or three days before they could ‘distinguish betwixt the Character of a Witwoud and a Truewit’ (Sig. [A3]v–[A4]r). (a) Dennis to Congreve. Dear Sir, I have now read over the Fox, in which though I admire the strength of Ben Johnson’s Judgement, yet I did not find it so accurate as I expected. For first the very thing upon which the whole Plot turns, and that is the Discovery which Mosca makes to Bonario; seems to me, to be very unreasonable. For I can see no Reason, why he should make that Discovery which introduces Bonario into his Masters House. For the Reason which the Poet makes Mosca give in the Ninth Scene of the third Act, appears to be a very Absurd one. Secondly, Corbaccio the Father of Bonario is expos’d for his Deafness, a Personal defect; which is contrary to the end of Comedy Instruction. For Personal Defects cannot be amended; and the exposing such, can never divert any but half-witted Men. It cannot fail to bring a thinking Man to reflect upon the Misery of Human Nature; and into what he may fall himself without any Fault of his own. Thirdly, the play has two Characters, which have nothing to do with the design of it, which are to be look’d upon as Excrescencies. Lastly, the Character of Volpone is Inconsistent with it self. Volpone is like Catiline, alieni appetens, sui profusus;1 but that is only a double in his Nature, and not an Inconsistence. The Inconsistence of the Character appears in this, that Volpone in the fifth Act behaves himself like a giddy Coxcombe, in the Conduct of the very Affair which he manag’d so craftily in the first four. In which the Poet offends against that Fam’d rule which Horace gives for the Characters.

338 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Servetur ad imum, Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.2 And Secondly, against Nature, upon which, all the rules are grounded. For so strange an Alteration, in so little a time, is not in Nature, unless it happens by the Accident of some violent Passion; which is not the case here. Volpone on the sudden behaves himself without common discretion, in the Conduct of the very Affair which he had manag’d with so much Dexterity, for the space of three Years together. For why does he disguise himself? Or, why does he repose the last Confidence in Mosca? Why does he cause it to be given out that he’s dead? Why, only to Plague his Bubbles. To Plague them, for what? Why only for having been his Bubbles. So that here is the greatest alteration in the World, in the space of twenty-four hours, without any apparent cause. The design of Volpone is to Cheat, he has carried on a Cheat for three years together, with Cunning and with Success. And yet he on a sudden in cold blood does a thing, which he cannot but know must Endanger the ruining all. (73–5) (b) Dennis to Congreve.

Dear Sir, I will not augment the Trouble which I give you by making an Apology for not giving it you sooner. Though I am heartily sorry that I kept such a trifle as the inclos’d, and a trifle writ Extempore, long enough to make you expect a labour’d Letter. But because in the Inclos’d, I have spoken particularly of Ben. Johnson’s Fox, I desire to say three or four words of some of his Plays more generally. The Plots of the Fox, the silent Woman, the Alchimist, are all of them very Artful. But the Intrigues of the Fox, and the Alchimist, seem to me to be more dexterously perplexed, than to be happily disentangled. But the Gordian knot in the Silent Woman is untyed with so much Felicity, that that alone, may Suffice to show Ben Johnson no ordinary Heroe. But, then perhaps, the Silent Woman may want the Foundation of a good Comedy, which the other two cannot be said to want. For it seems to me, to be without a Moral. Upon which Absurdity, Ben Johnson was driven by the Singularity of Moroses Character, which is too extravagant for instruction, and fit, in my opinion, only for Farce. For this seems to me, to Constitute the most Essential Difference, betwixt Farce and Comedy, that the Follies which are expos’d in Farce are Singular; and those are particular, which are expos’d in Comedy. These last are those, with which some part of an Audience may be suppos’d Infected, and to which all may be suppos’d Obnoxious. But the first are so very odd, that by Reason of their Monstrous Extravagance, they cannot be thought to concern an Audience; and cannot be supposed to instruct them. For the rest of the Characters in these Plays, they are for the most part true, and Most of the Humorous Characters Master-pieces. For Ben Johnson’s Fools, seem to shew his Wit a great deal more then his Men of Sense. I Admire his Fops, but barely Esteem his Gentlemen. Ben seems to draw Deformity more to the Life than Beauty. He is often so eager to pursue Folly, that he forgets to take Wit along with him. For the Dialogue, it seems to want very often that Spirit, that Grace, and that Noble Railery, which are to be found in more Modern Plays, and which are Virtues that ought to be Inseparable from a finish’d Comedy. But there seems to be one thing more wanting than all the rest, and that is Passion, I mean that fine and delicate Passion, by which the Soul shows its Politeness, ev’n in the midst of its trouble. Now to touch a Passion is the surest way to Delight. For nothing agitates like it. Agitation is the Health and Joy of the Soul, of

BEN JONSON 339

which it is so entirely fond, that even then, when we imagine we seek repose, we only seek Agitation. You know what a Famous Modern Critick has said of Comedy. Il faut que ses acteurs badinent noblement, Que son Noeud bien formé se denoue aisement; Que l’action Marchant ou la raison la guide, Ne se perde Jamma dans une Scens vuide, Que son Stile humble et doux se releve a propos, Que ses discours par tout fertiles en bons mots, Soient pleins de passions finement maniées, Et les Scenes toujours l’une a l’autre liées,3 I leave you to make the Aplication to Johnson—Whatever I have said myself of his Comedies, I submit to your better Judgment. For you who, after Mr. Wicherly, are incomparably the best Writer of it living; ought to be allowed to be the best Judge, too…. (76–9) (c) From Congreve to Dennis, ‘Concerning Humour in Comedy’, dated 10 July 1695.

[Congreve is discussing some things which are not humour.] Sometimes, Personal Defects are misrepresented for Humours. I mean, sometimes Characters are barbarously exposed on the Stage, ridiculing Natural Deformities, Casual Defects in the Senses, and Infirmities of Age. Sure the Poet must both be very III-natur’d himself, and think his Audience so, when he proposes by shewing a Man Deform’d, or Deaf, or Blind, to give them an agreeable Entertainment; and hopes to raise their Mirth, by what is truly an object of Compassion. But much need not be said upon this Head to any body, especially to you, who in one of your Letters to me concerning Mr. Johnson’s Fox, have justly excepted against this Immoral part of Ridicule in Corbaccio’s Character; and there I must agree with you to blame him, whom otherwise I cannot enough admire, for his great Mastery of true Humour in Comedy. (84–5). ⋆⋆⋆ [Congreve has distinguished ‘External habit’ and ‘Affectation’ from true humour.] But as these two last distinctions are the Nicest, so it may be most proper to Explain them, by Particular Instances from some Author of Reputation. Humour I take, either to be born with us, and so of a Natural Growth; or else to be grafted into us, by some accidental change in the Constitution, or revolution of the Internal Habit of Body; by which it becomes, if I may so call it, Naturaliz’d. Humour, is from Nature, Habit from Custom; and Affectation from Industry. Humour, shews us as we are. Habit, shews us, as we appear, under a forcible Impression. Affectation, shews what we would be, under a Voluntary Disguise. Though here I would observe by the way, that a continued Affectation, may in time become a Habit. The Character of Morose in the Silent Woman, I take to be a Character of Humour. And I choose to instance this Character to you, from many others of the same Author, because I know it has been Condemn’d by many as Unnatural and Farce: And you have your self hinted

340 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

some dislike of it, for the same Reason, in a Letter to me, concerning some of Johnson’s Plays. Let us suppose Morose to be a Man Naturally Splenetick and Melancholly; is there any thing more offensive to one of such a Disposition, than Noise and Clamour? Let any man that has the Spleen (and there are enough in England) be Judge. We see common Examples of this Humour in little every day. ‘Tis ten to one, but three parts in four of the Company that you dine with, are Discompos’d and Startled at the Cutting of a Cork, or Scratching a Plate with a Knife: It is a Proportion of the same Humour, that makes such or any other Noise offensive to the Person that hears it; for there are others who will not be disturb’d at all by it. Well; But Morose you will say, is so Extravagant, he cannot bear any Discourse or Conversation, above a Whisper. Why, It is his excess of this Humour, that makes him become Ridiculous, and qualifies his Character for Comedy. If the Poet had given him, but a Moderate proportion of that Humour, ’tis odds but half the Audience, would have sided with the Character, and have Condemn’d the Author, for Exposing a Humour which was neither Remarkable nor Ridiculous. Besides, the distance of the Stage requires the Figure represented, to be something larger than the Life; and sure a Picture may have Features larger in Proportion, and yet be very like the Original. If this Exactness of Quantity, were to be observed in Wit, as some would have it in Humour; what would become of those Characters that are design’d for Men of Wit? I believe if a Poet should steal a Dialogue of any length, from the Extempore Discourse of the two wittiest Men upon Earth, he would find the Scene but coldly receiv’d by the Town. But to the purpose. The Character of Sir John Daw in the same Play, is a Character of Affectation. He every where discovers an Affectation of Learning; when he is not only Conscious to himself, but the Audience also plainly perceives that he is Ignorant. Of this kind are the Characters of Thraso in the Eunuch of Terence, and Pyrgopolinices in the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus. They affect to be thought Valiant, when both themselves and the Audience know they are not. Now such a boasting of Valour in Men who were really Valiant, would undoubtedly be a Humour, for a Fiery Disposition might naturally throw a Man into the same Extravagance, which is only affected in the Characters I have mentioned. The Character of Cob in Every Man in his Humour, and most of the under Characters in Bartholomew-Fair, discover only a Singularity of Manners, appropriated to the several Educations and Professions of the Persons represented. They are not Humours but Habits contracted by Custom. Under this Head may be ranged all Country-Clowns, Sailers, Tradesmen, Jockeys, Gamesters and such like, who make use of Cants or peculiar Dialects in their several Arts and Vocations. One may almost give a Receipt for the Composition of such a Character: For the Poet has nothing to do, but to collect a few proper phrases and terms of Art, and to make the Person apply them by ridiculous Metaphors in his Conversation, with Characters of different natures. Some late Characters of this kind have been very successful; but in my mind they may be painted without much Art or Labour; since they require little more, than a good Memory and Superficial Observation. But true Humour cannot be shewn, without a Dissection of Nature, and a Narrow Search to discover the first Seeds, from whence it has its Root and growth. (86–90) NOTES 1 ‘Covetous of others’ possessions, he was prodigal of his own’: Sallust, Bellum Catalinae, 5.4.

BEN JONSON 341

2 ‘Have it kept to the end even as it came forth at first, and have it self-consistent’: Ars Poetica, ll. 126–7. 3 With well-bred Conversation you must please, And your Intrigue unravel’d be with ease: Your Action still should Reason’s Rules obey, Nor in an empty Scene may lose its way. Your humble Stile must sometimes gently rise; And your Discourse Sententious be, and Wise: The Passions must to Nature be confin’d, And Scenes to Scenes with Artful weaving joyn’d…. —Boileau, L’Art Poétique, 3.405–12, translated by Sir William Soame and John Dryden (The Art of Poetry, 1683, p. 52: see No. 88, above).

342

97. Jeremy Collier on Jonson as a model playwright 1698

From A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). The clergyman and controversialist Jeremy Collier (1650–1726) here compares the contemporary stage unfavourably with classical and Elizabethan drama. The book initiated a voluminous controversy, to which No. 98, below, also belongs. Collier quotes Discoveries on corrupt language and the representation of ‘base Pleasures’ on stage (pp. 50–1) —he cited the dictum from Discoveries about the instructive part of the comic poet’s office again in his A Second Defence of the Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1700), p. 89—and in the extracts below cites Jonsonian comedy as a model of modesty, propriety, and moral instruction. (a) From chapter iii, ‘The Clergy abused by the Stage’. [Having described the presentation of profane clergymen on the contemporary stage, Collier turns to clergymen in the plays of the older playwrights.] Towards the End of the Silent Woman, Ben Johnson brings in a Clergy-man, and a Civilian in their Habits. But then he premises a handsom Excuse, acquaints the Audience, that the Persons are but borrow’d, and throws in a Salvo for the Honour of either profession. In the Third Act, we have another Clergy-man; He is abused by Cutberd, and a little by Morose. But his Lady checks him for the ill Breeding of the Usage. In his Magnetick Lady, Tale of a Tub, and Sad Sheapherd, there are Priests which manage but untowardly. But these Plays were his last Works, which Mr. Dryden call his Dotages. This Author has no more Priests, and therefore we’ll take Leave. (126) (b) From chapter iv, ‘The Stage-Poets make their Principal Persons Vitious, and reward them at the End of the Play’. [Discussing Dryden’s defence of the happy endings of his villains in the preface to An Evening’s Love (1671: see No. 76, above).] Mr. Dryden makes Homewards, and endeavours to fortifie himself in Modern Authority. He lets us know that Ben Johnson after whom he may be proud to Err, gives him more than one example of this Conduct; That in the Alchemist is notorius, where neither Face nor his Master are corrected according to their Demerits. But how Proud soever Mr. Dryden may be of

344 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

an Errour, he has not so much of Ben Jonson’s company as he pretends. His Instance of Face &c. in the Alchemist is rather notorious against his Purpose then for it. For Face did not Council his Master Lovewit to debauch the Widdow; neither is it clear that the Matter went thus far. He might gain her consent upon Terms of Honour for ought appears to the contrary. ’Tis true Face who was one of the Principal Cheats is Pardon’d and consider’d. But then his Master confesses himself kind to a fault. He owns this Indulgence was a Breach of Justice, and unbecoming the Gravity of an old Man. And then desires the Audience to excuse him upon the Score of the Temptation. But Face continued in the Cousenage till the last without Repentance. Under favour I conceive this is a Mistake. For does not Face make an Apology before he leaves the Stage? Does he not set himself at the Bar, arraign his own Practise, and cast the Cause upon the Clemency of the Company? And are not all these Signs of the Dislike of what he had done? Thus careful the Poet is to prevent the Ill Impressions of his Play! He brings both Man and Master to Confession. He dismisses them like Malefactours; And moves for their Pardon before he gives them their Discharge. But the Mock-Astrologer has a gentler Hand: Wild-Blood and Jacinta are more generously used: There is no Acknowledgment exacted; no Hardship put upon them: They are permitted to talk on in their Libertine way to the Last: And take Leave without the least Appearance of Reformation. The Mock-Astrologer urges Ben Johnson’s Silent Woman as an other Precedent to his purpose. For there Dauphine confesses himself in Love with all the Collegiate Lady’s. And yet this naughty Dauphine is Crowned in the end with the Possession of his Uncles Estate, and with the hopes of all his Mistresses. This Charge, as I take it, is somewhat too severe. I grant Dauphine Professes himself in Love with the Collegiate Ladies at first. But when they invited him to a private Visit, he makes them no Promise; but rather appears tired, and willing to disengage. Dauphine therefore is not altogether so naughty as this Author represents him. Ben Johnson’s Fox is clearly against Mr. Dryden. And here I have his own Confession for proof. He declares the Poets end in this Play was the Punishment of Vice, and the Reward of Virtue. Ben was forced to strain for this piece of Justice, and break through the Unity of Design. This Mr. Dryden remarks upon him: How ever he is pleased to commend the Performance, and calls it an excellent Fifth Act.1 (151–3) ⋆⋆⋆ [On the didactic function of the drama.] Ben Johnson in his Dedicatory Epistle of his Fox has somewhat considerable upon this Argument; And declaims with a great deal of zeal, spirit, and good Sense, against the Licentiousness of the Stage. ⋆⋆⋆ [Quotes and paraphrases the dedication to Volpone, ll. 22–122.] Say you so! Why then if Ben Johnson knew any thing of the Matter, Divertisment and Laughing is not as Mr. Dryden affirms, the Chief End of Comedy. This Testimony is so very full and clear, that it needs no explaining, nor any enforcement from Reasoning, and Consequence. (157–9)

BEN JONSON 345

NOTE 1 Quoting Dryden’s Essay, No. 67, above.

346

98. William Congreve and Jeremy Collier on profanity in Bartholomew Fair 1698

(a) From Congreve’s pamphlet Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations (1698). Collier quotes numerous examples of profanity from Congreve’s The Double Dealer in A Short View. In the present pamphlet, Congreve defends himself, at times invoking Jonson against Collier: he likens the dispute to the controversy between Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and the puppet in Bartholomew Fair: ‘it is profane, and it is not profane, is all the Argument the thing will admit of on either side’ (pp. 45–6); later (pp. 97–8) he takes issue with Collier over his selective quotations from Jonson’s Discoveries. In the extract below, Congreve defends the line ‘tho’ Marriage makes Man and Wife One Flesh, it leaves ’em still Two Fools’ (The Double-Dealer (1694), Act II, Scene i, p. 18), which Collier, misquoting, had attacked as profaning Genesis 2. 24 (p. 82). Though Marriage makes Man and Wife one Flesh, it leaves ’em STILL two Fools. Which by means of that little word still, signifies no more, than that if two People were Fools, before or when they were married, they would continue in all probability to be Fools still, and after they were married. Ben. Johnson is much bolder in the first Scene of his Bartholomew Fair. There he makes Littlewit say to his Wife—Man and Wife make one Fool; and yet I don’t think he design’d even that, for a Jest either upon Genesis 2. or St. Matthew 19. I have said nothing comparable to that, and yet Mr. Collier in his penetration has thought fit to accuse me of nothing less. (47) (b) Collier’s answer, from his A Defence of the Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage. Dated 1699, though published in 1698. Mr. Congreve says, Ben. Johnson is much bolder in the first Scene of his Bartholomew Fair. Suppose all that. Is it an excuse to follow an ill Example, and continue an Atheistical practice? I thought Mr. Congreve in his penetration might have seen through this Question. Ben. Johnson (as he goes on) makes Littlewit say, Man and Wife make one Fool. I have said nothing comparable to that. Nothing comparable! Truly in the usual sense of that Phrase, Mr. Congreve, ’tis possible, has said nothing comparable to Ben. Johnson, nor it may be never will: But in his new Propriety he has said something more than comparable, that is a great deal worse. For though Littlewit’s Allusion is profane, the words of the Bible are spared. He does not Droll directly upon Genesis, or St. Matthew; Upon God the Son, or God the Holy

348 BEN JONSON

Ghost: Whereas Mr. Congreve has done that which amounts to both. And since he endeavours to excuse himself upon the Authority of Ben. Johnson, I shall just mention what Thoughts this Poet had of his profane Liberties, at a time when we have reason to believe him most in earnest. Now Mr. Wood reports from the Testimony of a great Prelate then present. ‘That when Ben. Johnson was in his last Sickness, he was often heard to repent of his profaning the Scriptures in his Plays, and that with Horrour.’⋆ Now as far as I can perceive, the Smut and Profaneness of Mr. Congreve’s Four Plays out-swell the Bulk of Ben. Johnson’s Folio. I heartily wish this Relation may be serviceable to Mr. Congreve, and that as his Faults are greater, his Repentance may come sooner. (53– 4) NOTE • Athen. Oxoniens. Vol. I, p. 519.

99. William Burnaby, Jonson a model for the comedy of characters and action 1701

From a letter ‘Wherein are laid down general Rules to judge of Tragedy and Comedy’ in Letters of Wit, Politicks and Morality (1701). Signed ‘W.B.’. The letter instructs a young man ‘just come from the University’ on the judgement of drama; as authorities it recommends Aristotle and Dacier (on p. 231, and again on p. 237). Burnaby (c. 1672–1706) was (in spite of the lack of interest in comedy he declares here) the author of a number of comedies of manners, including an adaptation of Twelfth Night (Love Betrayed, 1703). In Comedy, you will not be satisfied with the unnatural Farce of some Poets, which look like sick Men’s Dreams, compos’d of Parts that no Man can reduce to one Body, and run out of Nature to make you laugh; as if Comedy was only to make us laugh at the Folly of the Poet. I grant, Comedy does miss its Aim, if it moves not our Laughter; yet it is so to move it, as at the same time to convey Instruction with it. In Comedy, Action is absolutely necessary, as well as in Tragedy; and whatever is contrary to that, is to have no Place in either. In Comedy also the chief thing is the Fable, or Plot; the Excellence of which is to bring in such Characters and Incidents, as may naturally produce Humour. There will yet be room enough for Wit; but that Comick Poet, that makes Wit, and (what we call) Dialogue, his chief Aim, ought to write nothing but Dialogues, for he can never obtain the Name of a Dramatick Writer, with the best Judges. Our famous Ben. Johnson’s Silent Woman; The Fox, and the Alchymist, and most of Moliere’s Plays are the surest Standards to judge of Comedy; of which I say the less, because I never bestow much Thought upon that sort of Poem, my Taste, Genius, and Inclinations leading me to Tragedy. (235)

350

100. John Dennis on Jonson’s comedy 1702

From the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to Dennis’s play The Comical Gallant, or The Amours of Sir John Falstaff (1702). The play, an adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, had failed on stage and Dennis is here answering one of the objections made to it, viz. that it lacked love interest. For Dennis, see Introduction p. 19, and No. 96, above. After all, I was so willing to comply with Custom, that this Play has more of Love in it than the Original Comedy. But I desire People to consider, that Moliere got a great deal of Reputation in France by Comedies, in which there is very little or no Love, and that by those Comedies he very agreeably entertain’d the finest Ladies of the Court of France; that Madam de Montausier highly approved of the Precieuses Ridicules, tho there was not one jot of Love in it, that those Ladies were too proud to be thought to have Souls that were incapable of being pleased with an exact Imitation of Nature, tho that Imitation had nothing in it of the business to which they were bred; that those Persons who are for nothing but perpetual Love in our Plays, would do well to consider, whether they do not give others an occasion to think, that this error in them, proceeds either from the narrowness of their capacities, or the corruptness of their desires; that Humour, which was a diversion to Queen Elizabeth, and the Ladies of the Court of France, may not be thought a very improper one, for the most delicate Persons of the present Age; that Shakespear had little Love in the very best of his Plays, and Johnson less in his, and yet that this last was one of the best Comick Poets that ever was in the World; that he was so sensible, that the Ridiculum was the chief thing in Comedy, that he has always in his chief Comedies joyn’d his Love with Humour, and so made it ridiculous. (Sig. [A4]r-v)

352

101. Jonson discussed in a critical dialogue on the theatre 1702

From the anonymous A Comparison Between the Two Stages, with an Examen of The Generous Conqueror; And some Critical Remarks on the Funeral, or Grief Alamode, The False Friend, Tamerlane, and others. In Dialogue (1702). Staring B.Wells argues persuasively in ‘An Eighteenth-Century Attribution’, Journal of English and German Philology (1939), xxxviii, 233– 46, that the traditional attribution of the work to Charles Gildon is incorrect. The speakers in the dialogue are Ramble and Sullen, two gentlemen, and Chagrin, ‘a Critick’. At one stage Sullen, telling the story of the rivalry between the two theatres, describes how Rich, the manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, invoked Jonson’s help in competing with Betterton’s Shakespeare revivals at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre (pp. 43–4). [Sullen has lamented the fashion for music in contemporary drama.] Cri. But this error of Musick is not Yesterdays invention; old Ben with all his exactness stumbles here sometimes: It does not well become me to arraign so establish’d an Author, but I’m sure he has Faults of all kinds, and to the purpose in Hand I take the Song sung to Celia in the Fox, to be one; ’tis in the Seventh Scene of the Third Act: He brings her in by a Stratagem to Volpone, who is supposed to be Paralytick and quite disabled for Woman’s Sport; but finding himself alone with Celia, he shakes of his Hypocrisie and his Furs, and runs in an extasie to her Arms: She is ready to dye with the surprize, fain wou’d fly away, but he forces her to stay, and she, without saying one Word, is suppos’d to listen to an entertainment of Musick, tho’ in all the Agony that the Poet cou’d give her. One wou’d think she shou’d rend, and tear, and cry out for help, as she did afterwards with fury enough; but that wou’d ha’ spoil’d the Song: I beg Ben’s pardon for this presumption, but this being to the purpose it came into my Mind. Ramb. Your Example of Ben is enough to justifie this practice in some Men’s Opinion…. (52–3)

354

102. Jonson returns from the shades to castigate Thomas Baker 1704

From Dialogue vi, ‘Between Ben Jonson, and Mr. Bak—r the Author of the OxfordAct’, in the anonymous Visits from the Shades (1704). In this work various figures return from the dead to engage in dialogue with notable contemporary figures. In this extract Jonson rebukes Thomas Baker, whose play An Act at Oxford (1704) had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain. An altered version of the play, Hampstead Heath, was performed at Drury Lane in 1705. Jon. I am sorry any thing that was designed for the utility of Mankind shou’d be so barbarously perverted from its pristine Use: Your Age has strangely depress’d the Virtue of Comedy, and it only retains the Name, when in effect it’s nothing else but Abuse, and Lampoon. Ba. I deviate from your Judgement and think Poetry in a greater Perfection than ever it was among the Ancients [:] take one of their Plays and you’ll find it Phlegmatic and Dull, and has not half the Humour, or the Poynancy of Wit as are to be found in Modern Comedy. We draw and desect at large, and read a Lecture upon each particular Folly, when they only skimed upon the Surface, and seldom cut deeper than the Skin. Jon. I have heard how presumptuously you upstart Authors wou’d lessen the Glory of the last Age, to cry up your Tinsel, Flash and Whiptcream Wit. But I have kept a Correspondence with your Theater for these forty Years, and cou’d never yet find any of you come to the perfection of Shakespear; and, to speak without vaunting, any thing comparable to my Volpone, or Silent Woman. Ba. You and Shakespear writ well enough for the time; but your English was in the Oar and the Wit in its infancy in respect to what it’s now: We have had Waller and a Dryden, and have now a Wicherly and a Dennis, a Congreve and a Southern, who have melted down the Barbarism of your Age, and made our Diction more refined and sparkling. Then for our Plays, the Plots are stronger and finer wove, and the Incidents more curious and surprising. Jon. Our Plays, say you, ha, ha, ha—sure you have not the front to rank your self in the first Class of Wits. I own the Merits of those ingenious Gentlemen; yet let me tell you by the by, they are indebted to their Predecessors; and I am confident they will have the Modesty to own it. But when you wou’d include your self in the number, I recollect the Fly upon the Cartwheel, Lord, what a Dust we raise. Ba. And where’s the harm on’t? —I think my Comedies are not such despicable pieces that any of them wou’d disdain to own them; and if we may argue from the success they

356 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

have had upon the Stage, I see no reason why I shou’d be debarr’d from being rank’d in that number. Jon. A Man in a Fever may be as good a Judge upon taste, as the Body of the Theater upon the goodness of a Play: I found by my Cataline, and others of my Labours what relishes best with them, and who seeks for applause must regale their sicky Appetites with Mimicry and Farce; for they always puked at nervous Wit, and well-wrought Scenes; and so you may give me leave to guess by that, that your Constitution was just cut out for the Town. Ba. You may say as much by the Author of the World well Lost, or Love for Love. Jon. Not at all, there’s no manner of comparison, unless by the way of Antitheses. (38–9) [In the rest of the dialogue, ‘Ben Jonson’ details indignantly the liberties taken in Baker’s play.]

103. Samuel Cobb, Jonson’s notable thefts and successful piracies 1707

From ‘Of Poetry’, in Cobb’s Poems on Several Occasions (1707). This text is from the third edition, 1710. Samuel Cobb (1675–1713) was a master at Christ’s Hospital and produced a number of translations and occasional poems, as well as a modernized version of the Miller’s Tale, The Carpenter of Oxford (1712). [The poet has lamented Spenser’s excessive devotion to Chaucer.] The Coyn must sure for currant Sterling pass, Stamp’d with old Chaucer’s Venerable Face. But Johnson found it of a gross Alloy, Melted it down, and flung the Dross away He dug pure Silver from a Roman Mine, And prest his Sacred Image on the Coyn. We all rejoyc’d to see the pillag’d Oar, Our Tongue inrich’d, which was so poor before. Fear not, Learn’d Poet, our impartial blame, Such thefts as these add Lustre to thy Name. Whether thy labour’d Comedies betray The Sweat of Terence, in thy Glorious way, Or Catiline plots better in thy Play. Whether his Crimes more excellently shine, Whether we hear the Consul’s Voice Divine, And doubt which merits most, Rome’s Cicero, or Thine. All yield, consenting to sustain the Yoke, And learn the Language which the Victor spoke. So Macedon’s Imperial Hero threw His wings abroad, and conquer’d as he flew. Great Johnson’s Deeds stand Parallel with His, Were Noble Thefts, Successful Pyracies. Souls of a Heroe’s, or a Poet’s Frame Are fill’d with larger particles of flame. Scorning confinement, for more Lands they groan, And stretch beyond the Limits of their Own. (189–90)

358

104. Richard Steele on Jonson 1709

Richard Steele (1672–1729) joined the army after leaving Oxford without a degree. He wrote three comedies in the early part of the first decade of the eighteenth century: The Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1703), and The Tender Husband (1705). The first number of the thrice-weekly The Tatler appeared on 12 April 1709; it was to run to 271 numbers, ceasing publication on 2 January 1711. (a) From The Tatler, no. 14, 10–12 May 1709 (The Alchemist was played at Drury Lane on 11 May). This Evening, The Alchymist was play’d. This Comedy is an Example of Ben’s extensive Genius and Penetration into the Passions and Follies of Mankind. The Scene in the Fourth Act, where all the cheated People oppose the Man that would open their Eyes, has something in it so inimitably excellent, that it is certainly as great a Master-piece as has ever appear’d by any Hand. The Author’s great Address in showing Coveteousness the Motive of the Actions of the Puritan, the Epicure, the Gamester, and the Trader; and that all their Endeavours, how differently soever they seem to tend, center only in that one Point of Gain, shows he had to great Perfection that Discernment of Spirit, which constitutes a Genius for Comedy. (b) From The Tatler, no. 21, 26–8 May 1709 (Volpone was played at Drury Lane on 27 May). This Night was acted the Comedy called, The Fox; but I wonder the Modern Writers do not use their Interest in the House to suppress such Representations. A Man that has been at this, will hardly like any other Play during the Season: Therefore I humbly move, That the Writings, as well as Dresses, of the last Age, should give way to the present Fashion. We are come into a good Method enough (if we were not interrupted in our Mirth by such an Apparition as a Play of Johnson’s) to be entertain’d at more Ease, both to the Spectator and the Writer, than in the Days of Old. It is no Difficulty to get Hats, and Swords and Wigs, and Shoes, and every Thing else, from the Shops in Town, and make a Man show himself by his Habit, without more ado, to be a Counsellor, a Fop, a Courtier, or a Citizen, without being oblig’d to make those Characters talk in different Dialects to be distinguish’d from each other. This is certainly the surest and best Way of Writing: But such a Play as this makes a Man for a Month after over-run with Criticism, and enquire, What every man on the Stage said? What had such a one to do to meddle with such a

360 BEN JONSON

Thing? How came t’other, who was bred after such a Manner, to speak so like a Man conversant among a different People? These Questions rob us of all our Pleasure; for at this Rate, no one Sentence in a Play should be spoken by any one Character, which could possibly enter into the Head of any other Man represented in it; but every Sentiment should be peculiar to him only who utters it. Laborious Ben’s Works will bear this Sort of Inquisition, but if the present Writers were thus examin’d, and the Offences against this Rule cut out, few Plays would be long enough for the whole Evening’s Entertain ment. But I don’t know how they did in those old Times: This same Ben Johnson has made every one’s Passion in this Play be towards Money, and yet not one of them expresses that Desire, or goes about obtaining it, in any Way but what is peculiar to him only: One sacrifices his Wife, another his Profession, another his Posterity, from the same Motive; but their Characters are kept so skilfully a-part, that it seems prodigious, their Discourses should rise from the Invention of the same Author.

105. Nicholas Rowe, Jonson’s evil eye on Shakespeare 1709

From ‘Some Account of the Life, etc. of Mr William Shakespeare’, in volume i of Rowe’s six-volume edition of The Works of Mr William Shakespeare (1709). Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) was a dramatist who achieved success with The Fair Penitent (1703), and later with The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714). His slighting remarks about Jonson’s friendship for Shakespeare are the first treatment— barring Dryden’s remark on Jonson’s ‘Ode’ in the dedication to his translation of the Satires of Juvenal (1693) —of what was to be a favourite theme in Shakespeare criticism. See Introduction, p. 12 (on Dryden’s comment) and p. 28 (on Rowe). His Acquaintance with Ben Johnson began with a remarkable piece of Humanity and good Nature; Mr. Johnson, who was at that Time altogether unknown to the World, had offer’d one of his Plays to the Players, in order to have it Acted; and the Persons into whose Hands it was put, after having turn’d it carelessly and superciliously over, were just upon returning it to him with an ill-natur’d Answer, that it would be of no service to their Company, when Shakespear luckily cast his Eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to engage him first to read it through, and afterwards to recommend Mr. Johnson and his Writings to the Publick. After this they were profess’d Friends; tho’ I don’t know whether the other ever made him an equal return of Gentleness and Sincerity. Ben was naturally Proud and Insolent, and in the Days of his Reputation did so far take upon him the Supremacy in Wit, that he could not but look with an evil Eye upon any one that seem’d to stand in Competition with him. And if at times he has affected to commend him, it has always been with some Reserve, insinuating his Uncorrectness, a careless manner of Writing, and want of Judgment; the Praise of seldom altering or blotting out what he writ, which was given him by the Players who were the first Publishers of his Works after his Death, was what Johnson could not bear; he thought it impossible, perhaps, for another Man to strike out the greatest Thoughts in the finest Expression, and to reach those Excellencies of Poetry with the Ease of a first Imagination, which himself with infinite Labour and Study could but hardly attain to. Johnson was certainly a very good Scholar, and in that had the advantage of Shakespear, tho’ at the same time I believe it must be allow’d, that what Nature gave the latter, was more than a Ballance for what Books had given the former; and the Judgment of a great Man upon this occasion was, I think, very just and proper. In a Conversation between Sir John Suckling, Sir William D’Avenant, Endymion Porter, Mr. Hales of Eaton, and Ben Johnson; Sir John Suckling, who was a profess’d Admirer of Shakespear, had undertaken his Defence against Ben Johnson with some warmth; Mr.

362 BEN JONSON

Hales, who had sat still for some time, hearing Ben frequently reproaching him with the want of Learning, and Ignorance of the Antients, told him at last, That if Mr. Shakespear had not read the Antients, he had likewise not stollen any thing from ’em; (a Fault the other made no Conscience of) and that if he would produce any one Topick finely treated by any of them, he would undertake to shew something upon the same Subject at least as well written by Shakespear. Johnson did indeed take a large liberty, even to the transcribing and translating of whole Scenes together; and sometimes, with all Deference to so great a Name as his, not altogether for the advantage of the Authors of whom he borrow’d. And if Augustus and Virgil were really what he has made ’em in a Scene of his Poetaster, they are as odd an Emperor and a Poet as ever met. Shakespear, on the other Hand, was beholding to no body farther than the Foundation of the Tale, the Incidents were often his own, and the Writing intirely so. There is one Play of his, indeed, The Comedy of Errors, in a great measure taken from the Menœchmi of Plautus. How that happen’d, I cannot easily Divine, since, as I hinted before, I do not take him to have been Master of Latin enough to read it in the Original, and I know of no Translation of Plautus so Old as his Time, (xii–xv) [Towards the end of his account—having quoted meanwhile from Dryden’s prologue to The Tempest on Shakespeare as monarch over Jonson and Fletcher (No. 68, above) —Rowe returns to Jonson.] This is what I could learn of any Note, either relating to himself or Family: The Character of the Man is best seen in his Writings. But since Ben Johnson has made a sort of an Essay towards it in his Discoveries, tho’, as I have before hinted, he was not very Cordial in his Friendship, I will venture to give it in his Words. [Quotes Disc., ll. 647–68.] ⋆⋆⋆ As for the Passage which he mentions out of Shakespear, there is somewhat like it in Julius Caesar, Vol. V. p. 2260. [i.e. 1.1.47] but without the Absurdity; nor did I ever meet with it in any Edition that I have seen, as quoted by Mr. Johnson…. As to the Character given him by Ben Johnson, there is a good deal true in it: But I believe it may be as well express’d by what Horace says of the first Romans, who wrote Tragedy upon the Greek Models, (or indeed translated ’em) in his Epistle to Augustus. ——Natura sublimis & Acer Nam spiral Tragicum satis & fæliciter Audet, Sed turpem putat in Chartis metuitque Lituram.1 (xxxvii–xxxix) NOTE 1 ‘Being gifted with spirit and vigour; for he has some tragic inspiration, and is happy in his ventures, but deeming it disgraceful, hesitates to blot’: Horace, Epistles, 2.1.165–7.

106. Charles Gildon on Jonson 1710

Gildon (1665–1724) earned his living by editing anthologies and by writing plays and critical essays. On his view of Jonson, see Introduction, p. 21. (a) From The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (1710). [Gildon has discussed excessive volubility in oratory.] But on the Stage indeed the Case is something different, because there are Parts, and some particular Speeches, where such an extravagant Volubility is beautiful; as in several Places of the Part of True Wit in the Silent Woman, and some other Parts…. (108) ⋆⋆⋆ [On the fashion for operas on the contemporary stage.] But there are others, who tell us, that it is the Illness of our present Plays, that excuses their Fondness of Opera’s. But this is without the least Shadow of Reason or Truth; nor can they in any point prove our Plays to be worse, than those of an hundred Years ago, since it would be too palpable an Instance of their profound Ignorance or extravagant Prejudice, which is below a Man of Sense and Judgment, as may easily be made appear in Tragedy only, of which we are scarce yet arriv’d to a just Notion. Nor was there much of Comedy known before the Learned Ben Johnson, for no Man can allow any of Shakespear’s Comedies, except the Merry Wives of Windsor. There are indeed excellent Humours scatter’d about, and interwoven in his other Plays; but Ben Johnson was the first, that ever gave us one entire Comedy. Since him we have had Etheridge, Wicherly, Shadwel, and Crown in some of his Plays, with the Rest of King. Charles the IId’s Reign. Add since the Revolution, Mr. Congreve in three Plays has merited great Praise, and very well distinguish’d his Characters and hit true Humour. Mr. Vanbrook too has shewn Abundance of rude, unconducted and unartful Nature; his Dialogue is generally dramatic and easy. Nay, after these our very Farce Writers deserve more Esteem, than the taking Plays of an hundred Years ago, as having as much Nature, more Design and Conduct, and much more Wit. (173–4)

364 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

(b) From Gildon’s ‘An Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England’, printed in The Works of Mr William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh (1710), issued by the publisher Curll as a spurious supplement to Rowe’s six-volume Shakespeare, published by Tonson the year before. [He is discussing the mixture of ‘Errors’ and ‘Excellencies’ in Shakespeare’s work.] There is likewise ever a Sprightliness in his Dialogue, and often a Genteelness, especially in his Much ado about Nothing, which is very surprizing for that Age, and what the Learned BEN cou’d not attain by all his Industry; and I confess, if we make some small Allowance for a few Words and Expressions, I question whether any one has since excell’d him in it. (v) ⋆⋆⋆ It may perhaps be expected, that I shou’d say something of Comedy. But I have insensibly swell’d this Discourse to a greater Bulk, than I at first design’d so that I shall only say in General, that Comedy participates in many things with the Rules of Tragedy, that is, it is an Imitation both of Action and Manners, but those must both have a great deal of the Ridiculum in them, and indeed Humour is the Characteristic of this Poem, without which a Comedy loses its Name; as we have many of late, who fall from the Ridiculum into a meer Dialogue distinguish’d only by a pert sort of Chit Chat, and little Aims at Wit. Ben Johnson is our best Pattern, and has given us this Advantage, that tho’ the English Stage has scarce yet been acquainted with the Shadow of Tragedy, yet have we excell’d all the Ancients in Comedy. There is no Man has had more of this vis Comica than our Shakespear, in particular Characters and in the Merry Wives of WINDSOR he has given us a Play that wants but little of a perfect Regularity. Comedy in England has met with the Fate of Tragedy in Athens for that only has yet been cultivated, whereas the polite Athenians took first Care of Tragedy, and it was late e’er the Magistrate took any notice of Comedy, or thought it worthy their Inspection, (lix)

107. Richard Steele on Jonson’s plays as description and instruction 1712

The first number of The Spectator—published by Addison and Steele—appeared on 1 March 1711; it ran to 555 numbers. (a) From Steele, The Spectator, 5 May 1712 (Wilkes had played Mosca, and Benjamin Johnson Corbaccio, in a production of Volpone at Drury Lane on 29 April). When I am commending Wilks for representing the Tenderness of a Husband and a Father in Macbeth, the Contrition of a reformed Prodigal in Harry the Fourth, the winning Emptiness of a young Man of Good-nature and Wealth in the Trip to the Jubilee, the Officiousness of an artful Servant in the Fox: When I thus celebrate Wilks, I talk to all the World who are engaged in any of those Circumstances…. When we come to Characters directly comical, it is not to be imagined what Effect a well regulated Stage would have upon Men’s Manners. The craft of an Usurer, the Absurdity of a rich Fool, the awkward Roughness of a Fellow of half Courage, the ungraceful Mirth of a Creature of half Wit, might be for ever put out of Countenance by proper Parts for Dogget. Johnson, by acting Corbacchio the other Night, must have given all who saw him a thorough detestation of aged Avarice. (b) From Steele, The Spectator, 15 October 1712 (the essay is on the power of women’s charms over men). The Motions of the Minds of Lovers are no where so well described, as in the Works of skilful Writers for the Stage. The Scene between Fulvia and Curius, in the second Act of Johnson’s Catiline, is an excellent Picture of the Power of a Lady over her Gallant. The Wench plays with his Affections; and as a Man of all Places in the World wishes to make a good Figure with his Mistress, upon her upbraiding him with want of Spirit, he alludes to Enterprizes which he cannot reveal but with the Hazard of his Life. When he is worked thus far, with a little Flattery of her Opinion of his Gallantry, and Desire to know more of it out of her overflowing Fondness to him, he brags to her till his Life is in her Disposal.

366

108. John Dennis, Jonson no guide to Shakespeare for tragedy 1712

From An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear (1712). Dennis is discussing the great ‘Inconveniences’ under which Shakespeare wrote, including lack of time and lack of friends to consult about his work. For Dennis, see Introduction, p. 19, and No. 96, above. As for Friends, they whom in all likelihood Shakespear consulted most, were two or three of his Fellow-Actors, because they had the Care of publishing his Works committed to them. Now they, as we are told by Ben Johnson in his Discoveries were extremely pleas’d with their Friend for scarce ever making a Blot; and were very angry with Ben, for saying he wish’d that he had made a thousand. The Misfortune of it is, that Horace was perfectly of Ben’s mind. ——Vos O, Pompilius sanguis, carmen reprehendite, quod non Multa dies, & multa litura coercuit, atq; Præsectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.1 And so was my Lord Roscommon. Poets lose half the Praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.2 These Friends then of Shakespear were not qualify’d to advise him. As for Ben Johnson, besides that Shakespear began to know him late, and that Ben was not the most communicative Person in the World of the Secrets of his Art; he seems to me to have had no right Notion of Tragedy. Nay, so far from it, that he who was indeed a very great Man, and who has writ Comedies, by which he has born away the Prize of Comedy both from Ancients and Moderns, and been an Honour to Great Britain; and who has done this without any Rules to guide him, except what his own incomparable Talent dictated to him; This extraordinary Man has err’d so grossly in Tragedy, of which there were not only stated Rules, but Rules which he himself had often read, and had even translated, that he has chosen two Subjects, which according to those very Rules, were utterly incapable of exciting either Compassion or Terror for the principal Characters, which yet are the chief Passions that a Tragick Poet ought to endeavour to excite. (32–3) NOTES 1 ‘Do you, O sons of Pompilius, condemn a poem which many a day and many a blot has not restrained and refined ten times over to the test of the close-cut nail’: Ars Poetica, ll. 291–4.

368 BEN JONSON

2 Actually from Waller’s commendatory verse to the Earl of Roscommon’s translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry (1680), ‘Of this Translation, And of the Use of Poetry’ (ll. 41–2).

109. Lewis Theobald as ‘Benjamin Johnson’ 1715

From The Censor, first series. Text and numbers from the 1717 collected edition. Theobald (1688–1744) is best known for his Shakespeare Restored (1726), an attack on Pope’s edition of Shakespeare, and for his own Shakespearean edition (see No. 120, below). He wrote two series of the thrice-weekly paper The Censor, adopting the pseudonym ‘Benjamin Johnson’. (a) From no. 1 (1st series), 11 April 1715. [Theobald introduces himself as the heir of a Jonson conceived as a stern enemy to social and literary abuses.] BEING lineally descended from Benjamin Johnson of surly Memory, whose Name as well as a considerable Portion of his Spirit, without one Farthing of Estate, I am Heir to; I took up a Resolution to let the World know, that there is still a poor Branch of that Immortal Family remaining, sworn and avow’d Foes to Nonsense, bad Poets, illiterate Fops, affected Coxcombs, and all the Spawn of Follies and Impertinence, that make up and incumber the present Generation. When I found this Spirit of my great Ancestor growing too powerful to be suppress’d, and strugling within my Bosom for Vent; when I observ’d my Resentments to be rather a Punishment to my self, than a Correction of the Vices of others; I determin’d to let my Heart breath more freely, and give a Loose to my Indignation, (i, 1–2) (b) From no. 14 (1st series), 11 May 1715. ‘Benjamin Johnson’ proposes that poets more than any other group are ‘indebted to the Grape’, and cites the examples of Homer, Ennius, and Horace. He prints certain ‘Memorandums’ allegedly written by Jonson and connecting his literary output with his alcoholic consumption. The ‘Memorandums’ had a second life as authentic Jonson remains when copies of them were discovered in Dulwich College Library in the nineteenth century and in a Catiline quarto in the twentieth century. They even figure in H & S, i, 188–9, and iii, 608. See Mark Eccles, ‘Memorandums of the Immortal Ben’, Modern Language Notes (1936), li, 520–3.

370 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

That my Reader may see, our English Poets have used the same Privilege with as good Success, I shall present him with a few short Memorandums of my great Ancestor Ben Johnson, which have been preserved with great Care in our Family. Mem. I laid the Plot of my Volpone, and wrote most of it, after a Present of Ten Dozen of Palm Sack, from my very good Lord T—r; That Play I am positive will last to Posterity, and be acted when, I and Envy are Friends, with Applause. Mem. The first Speech in my Cataline, spoken by Scylla’s Ghost, was writ after I parted from my Boys at the Devil-Tavern; I had drunk well that Night, and had brave Notions. There is one Scene in that Play which I think is Flat; I resolve to mix no more Water with my Wine. Mem. Upon the Twentieth of May, the King, Heaven reward him, sent me one Hundred Pounds; I went often to the Devil about that Time, and wrote my Alchymist before I had spent Fifty Pounds of it. Mem. At Christmas my Lord B—took me with him into the Country; There was great Plenty of excellent Claret-wine, a new Character offered it self to me here, upon which I wrote my Silent Woman. My Lord smiled, and made me a noble Present upon reading the first Act to him, ordering at the same time a good Quantity of the Wine to be sent to London with me when I went, and it lasted me till my Work was finished. Mem. The Tale of a Tub, the Devil is an Ass, and some others of low Comedy, were written by poor Ben Johnson. I remember that I did not succeed in any one Composition for a whole Winter; it was that Winter honest Ralph the Drawer died, and when I and my Boys drank bad Wine at the Devil. I think that these Memorandums of the immortal Ben are sufficient to justify the Opinion of Horace, and I do assure my Reader that they are faithfully transcribed from the Original. (i, 102–4)

110. John Dennis on suggestibility in The Alchemist 1718

From a letter by Dennis, dated 3 October 1718, printed in Original Letters, Familiar, Moral and Critical (1721), volume i. For Dennis, see Introduction, p. 19, and No. 96, above. What my Lord Rochester and the Author of Hudibras have declar’d in their Verses, our Dramatick Poets have endeavour’d to shew upon the Stage, viz. That the Eyes of the Rabble of Mankind are downright Cullies to their Ears, and that they easily believe that they actually See what they are only impudently Told of: Witness what passes between Vindicius and old Brutus, in the Junius Brutus of Lee1; and between Hamlet and Polonius, in the Hamlet of Shakespear, which seems to be the original of the other. And has not Ben, Learned Ben, who is so great a Master of his Art, and consequently of Human life and nature, shewn us the very reverse of this in the Catastrophe of his admirable Alchimist, viz. shewn us Persons who what before they had actually seen, are made to believe that they only vainly imagin’d, and for no other Reason but because they are impudently told that they only vainly imagin’d it. (i, 39–40) NOTE 1 Nathaniel Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus (first performed 1680).

372

111. John Dennis, Jonson invoked against Steele 1720

From Letter ii of The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar (1720). This pamphlet takes the form of two letters to ‘Sir John Edgar’, i.e. Sir Richard Steele, knighted by George I in 1715. It was published on or before 5 February 1720; a second part, containing a third and fourth letter, followed soon after. Dennis and Steele had quarrelled over theatrical and personal affairs—the treatment Dennis’s Coriolanus adaptation, The Invader of his Country, had received at Drury Lane, Steele’s playhouse, and over a loan Steele had not repaid Dennis—and they disagreed on aesthetic matters. Letter i casts Steele as Sir Epicure Mammon for his gullibility in investing in alchemical experiments and ill-fated get-rich-quick schemes like a patent collapsible hooped petticoat (p. 18). [Steele had attacked the rules of drama in a number of his periodical The Theatre shortly before The Characters and Conduct was published (no. 2, 5 January 1720).] I had shewn you before, that Reason is against you. For to talk of improving an Art, by declaring against the Rules of it, must be a Jest to every Painters and Fidlers Prentice in Town. Now let us see, whether Experience, and the Practice of the Stage, declare for you. I am afraid we shall find, upon a strict Scrutiny, that the very best of our Plays are the most Regular. Heroick Love, and the Orphan, are certainly Two of the best of our Tragedies; and they are as certainly Two of the most regular. The Fox, the Alchymist, the Silent Woman of Ben Johnson, are incomparably the best of our Comedies; and they are certainly the most regular of them all. If you will not take my word for this; let us see what Ben says himself to the Matter, in his Prologue to the Fox. Nor made he his Play from Jests stoln from each Table, But makes Jests to fit his Fable; And so presents quick Comedy refin’d, As best Criticks have design’d. The Laws of Time, Place, Persons he observeth; From no needful Rule he swerveth. Now, do not you see by this last Line, that it was the Opinion of the greatest of all our Comick Poets, That the Rules were absolutely necessary to Perfection? (28)

374

112. Charles Gildon, Jonson the master of comedy 1721

From The Laws of Poetry, as laid down by the Duke of Buckinghamshire in his Essay on Poetry, by the Earl of Roscommon in his Essay on Translated Verse, And by the Lord Lansdowne on Unnatural Flights in Poetry, Explain’d and Illustrated (1721). The extracts printed are from Gildon’s commentary on An Essay upon Poetry (1682) by John Sheffield, first Duke of Buckinghamshire and Normanby. For Gildon, see Introduction, pp. 21, 22, and No. 106, above. Jonson is seen here as the consummate artist among English comic dramatists, and the only notable critic between Sidney and Dryden. [Gildon, giving a history of English poetry, has just considered Shakespeare.] Next in time we must place the immortal Ben Johnson, a man not only of compleat learning, but of the most consummate comick genius that ever appear’d in the world, ancient or modern; but I don’t find that he met with encouragement which bore any manner of proportion to his merit: However, the propension of the people to theatrical entertainments produc’d so considerable an emolument to the poet, as well as the player, that we find the playwrights about this time grew very numerous; but there were none else of any great merit, not excepting Beaumont and Fletcher themselves, who at best have only written two or three tolerable Comedies. (33–4) ⋆⋆⋆ It was very late before criticism came into England. After that little Sir Philip Sidney has said of it in his apology for poetry, Ben Johnson made the earliest steps towards it, not only in his discoveries, but in his translation of Horace’s art of poetry. After him I know not of any thing ’till since the restoration…. (61) ⋆⋆⋆ [On modern plays cobbled together from descriptions and odd scenes.] But say the fautors of our stage, these pieces give pleasure, which is one considerable end of all poetry. But I must reply, that the pleasure they give is but mean, poor, and lifeless, and infinitely short of that transporting delight which a just and regular Tragedy, written according to art, excites in the soul, at the same time that it conveys lessons of the highest importance to human life.

376 BEN JONSON

A Jack-pudding upon a mountebank’s stage gives pleasure to the rabble that listen to him, and perhaps more than the immortal Ben Johnson, by his admirable Comedies, from the stage of the theatre; yet certainly these gentlemen will not have the assurance to put Ben Johnson and Jack-pudding on a foot: It is not therefore sufficient meerly to give pleasure, unless that pleasure be likewise rational, which is always, as I have formerly taken notice, join’d with the profitable. (159) [Gildon has admired the skilful exposition in the first scene of Otway’s Venice Preserved.] The same may be said of Shakespear, in the opening of his Tempest, where all the narration that Prospero makes to his daughter Miranda has not the least clumsy regard to the audience, but is absolutely necessary to the information of Miranda. Ben Johnson, in his Comedy of the Alchymist, has the same admirable address, in letting the audience into the knowledge of all that was necessary for them to be inform’d in, in relation to what was antecedent to the opening of the play, by that comical quarrel betwixt Face and Subtle, in which the sage Doll Common is the prudent moderator. (205) ⋆⋆⋆ [Quotes Congreve on Morose from No. 96(c), above.] From hence ’tis plain, that Morose is not a particular, but a general character, as I have observ’d; and the same may be said of almost all the characters of Ben Johnson, and indeed of every character of any other comic poet that is truly valuable. It is no difficult matter for a fellow of a very shallow understanding, to make sport with some particular character, and expose on the stage some particular person, that is not so great a fool as the author who exposes him. But it is only the talent of a great genius to form, from the various follies of many, one comic character truly ridiculous and useful, which, when done, will always find applause from the judicious at least, if not from the million…. (248)

113. John Dennis, Jonson the authority for the comedy of ridicule 1722

From A Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter, a pamphlet published in November 1722. The Defence was directed against Steele, whose much-publicized comedy The Conscious Lovers was about to open in London. Steele had attacked Etherege’s The Man of Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) in The Spectator, no. 65, 15 May 1711, as licentious and lacking in gentility; Dennis’s pamphlet defends the realism and moral instruction of the older comedy against the new, which prided itself on presenting a virtuous hero for emulation. …either Sir George Etheridge, did design to make this a genteel Comedy or he did not. If he did not design it, what is it to the Purpose, whether ’tis a genteel Comedy or not? Provided that ’tis a good one: For I hope, a Comedy may be a good one, and yet not a genteel one. The Alchimist is an admirable Comedy, and yet it is not a genteel one. We may say the same of The Fox, and the Silent Woman, and of a great many more. (7) ⋆⋆⋆ Thus Comedy instructs and pleases most powerfully by the Ridicule, because that is the Quality which distinguishes it from every other Poem. The Subject therefore of every Comedy ought to be ridiculous by its Constitution; the Ridicule ought to be of the very Nature and Essence of it. Where there is none of that, there can be no Comedy. It ought to reign both in the Incidents and in the Characters, and especially in the principal Characters, which ought to be ridiculous in themselves, or so contriv’d, as to shew and expose the Ridicule of others. In all the Masterpieces of Ben Johnson, the principal Character has the Ridicule in himself, as Morose in The Silent Woman, Volpone in The Fox, and Subtle and Face in The Alchimist: And the very Ground and Foundation of all these Comedies is ridiculous. ’Tis the very same Thing in the Master-pieces of Moliere. The Mis-Antrope, the Impostor, the Avare, and the Femmes Secuanter. Nay, the Reader will find, that in most of his other Pieces, the principal Characters are ridiculous; as, L’Etoardy, Les precieuses Ridicules, Le Cocu Imaginaire, Le Fascheux, and Monseur de pousceaugnac, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, L’Ecole de Maris, L’Ecole des Femmes, L’Amour Medicis, Le Medicin Malgré luy, La Manage Forcé, George Dandin, Les Fourberies de Scapin, Le Malade Imaginaire. The Reader will not only find, upon Reflection, that in all these Pieces the principal Characters are ridiculous, but that in most of them there is the Ridicule of Comedy in the very Titles. (21–2)

378

114. Alexander Pope on the relations between Shakespeare and Jonson 1725

From the preface to volume i of his edition of The Works of Shakespeare. In Six Volumes (1725). Pope’s was an important non-partisan voice in the matter of Jonson’s dealings with Shakespeare before and after the latter’s death, fast becoming a central question in Jonson criticism. See Introduction, pp. 28–30. [Pope, accounting for Shakespeare’s ‘defects’, has mentioned first the demands of an audience ‘generally composed of the meaner sort of people’.] It may be added, that not only the common Audience had no notion of the rules of writing, but few even of the better sort piqu’d themselves upon any great degree of knowledge or nicety that way; till Ben Johnson getting possession of the Stage, brought critical learning into vogue: And that this was not done without difficulty, may appear from those frequent lessons (and indeed almost Declamations) which he was forced to prefix to his first plays, and put into the mouth of his Actors, the Grex, Chorus, &c. to remove the prejudices, and inform the judgment of his hearers. Till then, our Authors had no thoughts of writing on the model of the Ancients: their Tragedies were only Histories in Dialogue; and their Comedies follow’d the thread of any Novel as they found it, no less implicitly than if it had been true History. (vi) ⋆⋆⋆ [On the question of Shakespeare’s want of learning:] In Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, not only the Spirit, but Manners, of the Romans are exactly drawn; and a still nicer distinction is shown, between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former, and of the latter. His reading in the ancient Historians is no less conspicuous, in many references to particular passages: and the speeches copy’d from Plutarch in Coriolanus may, I think, as well be made an instance of his learning, as those copy’d from Cicero in Catiline, of Ben Johnson’s. (ix–x) ⋆⋆⋆ I am inclined to think, this opinion proceeded originally from the zeal of the Partizans of our Author and Ben Johnson; as they endeavoured to exalt the one at the expence of the other. It is ever the nature of Parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that

380 BEN JONSON

because Ben Johnson had much the most learning, it was said on the one hand that Shakespear had none at all; and because Shakespear had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Johnson wanted both. Because Shakespear borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Johnson borrowed every thing. Because Johnson did not write extempore, he was reproached with being a year about every piece; and because Shakespear wrote with ease and rapidity, they cryed, he never once made a blot. Nay the spirit of opposition ran so high, that whatever those of the one side objected to the other, was taken at the rebound and turned into Praises; as injudiciously, as their antagonists before had made them Objections. Poets are always afraid of Envy; but sure they have as much reason to be afraid of Admiration. They are the Scylla and Charybdis of Authors; those who escape one, often fall by the other. Pessimum genus inimicorum Laudantes, says Tacitus:1 and Virgil desires to wear a charm against those who praise a Poet without rule or reason. —Si ultra placitum laudarit, baccare frontem Cingito, ne Vati noceat—2 But however this contention might be carried on by the Partizans on either side, I cannot help thinking these two great Poets were good friends, and lived on amicable terms and in offices of society with each other. It is an acknowledged fact, that Ben Johnson was introduced upon the Stage, and his first works encouraged, by Shakespear. And after his death, that Author writes To the memory of his beloved Mr William Shakespear, which shows as if the friendship had continued thro’ life. I cannot for my own part find any thing Invidious or Sparing in those verses, but wonder Mr Dryden was of that opinion. He exalts him not only above all his Contemporaries, but above Chaucer and Spenser, whom he will not allow to be great enough to be rank’d with him; and challenges the names of Sophocles, Euripides, and Æschylus, nay all Greece and Rome at once, to equal him. And (which is very particular) expressly vindicates him from the imputation of wanting Art, not enduring that all his excellencies shou’d be attributed to Nature. It is remarkable too, that the praise he gives him in his Discoveries seems to proceed from a personal kindness; he tells us that he lov’d the man, as well as honoured his memory; celebrates the honesty, openness, and frankness of his temper; and only distinguishes, as he reasonably ought, between the real merit of the Author, and the silly and derogatory applauses of the Players. Ben Johnson might indeed be sparing in his Commendations (tho’ certainly he is not so in this instance) partly from his own nature, and partly from judgment. For men of judgment think they do any man more service in praising him justly, than lavishly. I say, I would fain believe they were Friends, tho’ the violence and ill-breeding of their Followers and Flatterers were enough to give rise to the contrary report. I would hope that it may be with Parties, both in Wit and State, as with those Monsters described by the Poets; and that their Heads at least may have something humane, tho’ their Bodies and Tails are wild beasts and serpents, (xi–xiv) NOTES 1 ‘Those worst of enemies, the people who praise you’: Agricola, 41.1–2. 2 ‘Should he praise me unduly, wreathe my brow with foxglove, least [his evil tongue] harm the bard’: Eclogues, 7.27–8.

115. Alexander Pope, observations on Jonson (?) 1728, 1733 or 1734

From the remarks collected by Spence. This text from Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men: Collected from Conversation, ed. James M.Osborn (Oxford 1966), 2 vols. Spence (1699–1768), a critic and friend of Pope’s, compiled, but did not publish, a volume of anecdotes and sayings of the literary men he knew, and of Pope in particular. It was first published, in two separate versions, in 1820. The dates given below for the extracts are those given by Osborn. Spence also records that Pope put Jonson in a list (with Etherege, Vanbrugh, Wycherley, Congreve, and Shakespeare) of the best English writers of comedy (ed. Osborn, i, 206), and in a longer list of prose writers who might form the basis of an authoritative dictionary (i, 170). (a) From 1728 (?). It was, and is, a general opinion that Ben Jonson and Shakespeare lived in enmity against one another. Betterton has assured me often that there was nothing in it, and that such a supposition was founded only on the two parties which in their lifetime listed under one, and endeavoured to lessen the character of the other mutually. (i, 23) (b) From 1728 (?).

There was such a real character as Morose in Ben Jonson’s time. Dryden somewhere says so in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, and Mr. Pope had it from Betterton, and he from Sir William Davenant, who lived in Jonson’s time and knew the man. (i, 183) (c) From 1728 (?).

What trash are his [Ben Jonson’s] works, taken all together! (i, 184) (d) From 1733 or 1734.

Corneille, Racine, and Molière better than any of ours. [The] Careless Husband not our best comedy; Congreve has one or two better: [The] Silent Woman our best. Hard to name anyone for our best tragedy. All for Love has been reckoned the most complete. (i, 207)

382

116. Shakespeare and the actors defended against Pope and Jonson 1729

From the anonymous An Answer to Mr. Pope’s Preface to Shakespeare, In a Letter to a Friend. Being a Vindication of the Old Actors who were the Publishers and Performers of that Author’s Plays…. By a Stroling Player (it is signed at the end ‘Anti-Scriblerus Histrionicus’). Traditionally attributed to the actor John Roberts, though Brian Vickers suggests on internal evidence that the author may be Theobald (Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (1974–81), ii, 449). Pope had quoted Jonson’s remark in Discoveries on the players’ commendation of Shakespeare for never blotting a line, and had cited Heminge and Condell’s First Folio preface (No. 114, above). Pope returned to the topic in 1742 in a note to the Dunciad in Four Books, 1.134. Later in the pamphlet there are brief references to Jonson as ‘Malevolent BEN’ (p. 17), and as one ‘who libels all the Fraternity’ (p. 38). In the end I don’t find any Necessity for either of their Speeches; either JOHNSON’S Wou’d he had blotted out a Thousand! Or POPE’S There never was a more groundless Report! The first I declare with those mis-judging Players was a malevolent Speech; and as to the latter, I deny, the undeniable Evidences to the Contrary. They are both Malevolent enough to the Actors; for Johnson inclines to say it as much in direct Opposition of Opinion to the Players, as in Detraction of Shakespear; and Pope pronounces his, for no other View or Reason, than to give the Players in general, the positive Lye. (9) ⋆⋆⋆ I cannot give into the Opinion, that Johnson’s Friendship to Shakespear continu’d through Life, or even was faithfully preserv’d any part of it, and therein beg Pardon, that I once more dissent from this infallible EDITOR: If it is an acknowledg’d Fact that Ben. Johnson was introduc’d upon the Stage, and his first Works encourag’d by Shakespear, How mean, how base, and malevolent does it appear in him, to pick out a single Sentence from all his Writings, and misquote it after his Friend’s Decease in order to reproach him with Weakness of Judgment, and expose him to Ridcule and Laughter?1 It wou’d have greatly proved his Gratitude, and Honour of his Memory, if he had carefully revis’d the Volume of his Plays, and other Impressions, and purged them from all the Absurdities of the Printers and Players; For he had Learning, Conversation, Friendship to the Man, (if you will believe our Prefacer) Leisure of Life long after him; right Judgment as a Poet; and Instigations from the derogatory Applauses of the Players, &c. But he was too full of his own Merit, and too invidious of his Rivals, to oppose the least Thing that weaken’d the Reputation of any one of them: And it is to be fear’d, that if he had undertaken this Task (well becoming

384 BEN JONSON

his Friendship profess’d!) We shou’d have seen as many Injuries from his prejudic’d Pen, as from all the Abuses, which now stand charg’d on the Players. But to return to the particular View of this Epistle, I shall now come to that Part of the Charge impos’d on the Players as his EDITORS. (10–11) NOTE 1 The reference is to Jonson’s criticism of a version of Julius Caesar, 3.1.47–8, as ‘ridiculous’ in Disc., 661–6.

117. William Levin, Shakespeare and Jonson a lesson to their successors 1731

From a letter in The Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal, no. 131, 10 April 1731, by ‘Crito’. The author is identified in Henry Baker’s set of the journal as William Levin, one of its main contributors: see Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (1930), pp. 105–6 and 106n. The Universal Spectator had been started by Baker in 1728; the first number had an introductory article by his father-in-law, Daniel Defoe. The subject of the letter printed here is ‘our present Want of Taste’. I shall forbear any Remarks on those Writers, who meddle only with the severer Parts of Learning, and confine myself solely to the Poets, as the Authors more immediately under your Consideration; and whose Works, as they are more generally read, are consequently the best understood, by the far greater Part of those who peruse your Papers. SHAKESPEAR and JOHNSON were the two first Writers, who gave any Lustre to the Dramatick Performances of our Nation; and tho’ we have since them, had abundance of Authors in that Way; yet I believe I shall hardly be contradicted in saying, that there have been very few, who can with any Justice be call’d their Equals, and not so much as one, who can be said to have excell’d them. Their distinguishing Talent consists in having always kept Nature in their View, from whence the Propriety of their Thoughts recommends them to those who read them with Judgment; and the entring into the Spirit of whatever Character they represent, moves always the Passions of their Auditors, according to the excellent Observation of Horace, Si vis me flere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi:1 The peculiar Excellencies of SHAKESPEAR, are the marvellous Boldness of his Invention, and the admirable Energy of his Expression. JOHNSON’S Perfections on the other Hand, are his prodigious Art in weaving his Plots, and that nice Distinction there is between all his Characters. This Difference lies in them, merely thro’ the one’s Want of Knowledge in the Antients, and the other’s perfect Acquaintance and profound Respect for them; which is also the sole Occasion of their Mistakes, the former being often irregular, and the latter sometimes too servile an Imitator. However, their Beauties are a great Over-ballance for their Blemishes; and one may always pronounce in Favour of their Writings, without Fear of being thought to have an ill Taste. In the Gross of the Dramatick Poets who succeeded them, the more exalted Characters met with a terrible Transformation; their Monarchs either thunder’d in

386 BEN JONSON

tyrannical Bombast, or whin’d forth their amorous Complaints, with a Tenderness below their Rank. In Comedy the Alteration was also for the worse, the grand Parts being almost continually a Beau or Debauchee; in fine, the Heroes of that Sett of Writers, were most of them Almanzors, and their fine Gentlemen Dorimants; the one a Character altogether out of Nature, and the other a Disgrace to it. This naturally leads me to the Mention of the Sourse of their Errors, which was plainly this, that the Poets of those Days, either thro’ Force or Inclination, comply’d with the prevailing false Taste of Mankind, rather than they would take any Pains to amend it. Mr. Dryden, if I am not much mistaken, has almost own’d this in one of his Dedications; and whoever considers the present State of the Drama, will readily observe the Consequence of such a Complaisance, viz. that the Town and its Authors both will grow daily worse and worse. ’Till instead of the manly Entertainments of a Julius and an Othello; the finish’d Workings of a Vulpone, or an Alchymist; our Stages are polluted with the Conjurations of an Harlequin Faustus, or render’d yet more ridiculous, from the Feats of a Tom Thumb. NOTE 1 ‘If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself’: Ars Poetica, ll. 102–3.

118. Jonson’s comedy obsolete 1732

From the preface to the anonymous Memoirs of the Life of Robert Wilkes, Esq;. Text from the second edition (also 1732). The writer has defended tragedy as a forceful means of amending vices, and now describes how comedy exposes follies. The obscurity of Jonson’s comedies is explained by the fact that his characters are direct copies of his contemporaries, following the story, first in Aubrey, that Volpone is based on the famous miser Sir Thomas Sutton (Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (1949), p. 291). The present age, he suggests, does not provide suitable models for comic characters since modern fools are too witless entirely, and too far beyond reformation. He had earlier warned that if the stage continues to be prostituted to pantomimes and ballad operas ‘JOHNSON in twenty Years will be an Author as antiquated as PLAUTUS’ (in the dedication, Sig. A3r). I flatter myself that what I have said will account in some measure for the Diversity of Humour which is to be found especially in our English Plays; when they were wrote, they were doubtless intended to combat the reigning Vices, Follies and Impertinences, which like Weeds, grew up not only among the Vulgar, but even in the midst of the Court, the City, and the Camp. Johnson, the Father of the English Comedy, is accused by some of having intended to represent particular Persons in his Plays: Every-body who knows any Thing of Dramatic Writing must have heard, That the Character of Volpone was intended for an old scraping Citizen, who by his great Cunning acquir’d a vast Fortune, and by leaving it to charitable Uses has acquired as large a Stock of Reputation in future Times: ’Tis highly probable that this Method of Ben’s might be of great Service, as to the immediate Fortune of his Plays, tho’ at this Day it doubtless leaves us in the Dark, as to many Particulars which, if we had an exact Character of him against whom the Satyr is pointed, would become Beauties instead of being thought Defects; yet even where personal Reproach is omitted, and the Character of the Fop, to make use of his Grace of Buckingham’s Expression, is laid on broad,1 and takes in the whole Compass of those Foibles which are in Favour with the Beau Monde at the Time the Author writes; such is the Variety of Characters presented in the Space of a few Years on the publick Theatre of Life, that in a short time the most striking grow antiquated, and the Publick by gazing continually on what passes in their own Times, lose all Ideas of what passed before. Hence it follows that not only Johnson’s Plays, but all the Tribe of Writers who followed him, fail

388 BEN JONSON

of moving a Modern Audience upon the Stage, or of entertaining them in their Closets. (vii–viii) NOTE 1 John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, An Essay upon Poetry (1682), p. 16.

119. A proper reaction to Volpone 1733

From the lead article by ‘Henry Stonecastle’ in The Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal, no. 270, 8 December 1733. The author of this article has not been identified. On this periodical, see No. 117, above. The most recent production of Volpone at Covent Garden was on 24 November 1733. On the reactions to Volpone described in the article, see Introduction, pp. 22–3. From my CHAMBERS, Lincoln’s-Inn. WEDNESDAY Evening.

THERE are no Entertainments in themselves more innocent, or to the Publick more instructive than those of the Theatre. I wou’d not be thought to mean the Grotesque Pantomime, or the Harlequin Productions of the present Age, but the noble Force of Tragedy, which can excite in us an Ambition to be virtuous, or the pleasing Strokes in Comedy, which with Humour, can lash our Vices, and with Satire drive away our Follies: Comedy carries with it such a Vein of Mirth, mix’d with Morality, that I am not surpriz’d at the common Opinion of my Countrymen, of chusing to read Tragedy, but to have Comedy exhibited to their View. Whatever Indulgence of Mirth may be claim’d from the Nature of Comedy, yet that Writer, who studies only to raise a Laugh, tho’ he perhaps may meet with Success, will, in the Judgment of all Men of Sense, be esteemed but a wretched Poet. Those humorous Productions which are distinguish’d by the Name of Farce, tho’ they may have something entertaining, and be heigthen’d by some Strokes of Satire, cannot raise in us that Pleasure which true Comedy will always afford. It is not the smart Jest, the odd Drollery, or the lively Repartee, but the natural View of Life; the Manners, the Vices, the Singularity and Humours of Mankind, pleasantly represented to our Sight, which are alone worthy to be call’d the Entertainments of Comedy. Among all the Comic Writers of our Nation, there is none which has drawn Nature stronger, or put the Follies or Vices of Mankind in a clearer Light than the judicious Ben Johnson, who in all his Plays has not only exhibited Nature, but Nature of the most beautiful Kind, as he not only excites Men to be good, but wou’d make good Men better. Sir Jasper Truby, who had not seen a Play for many Years, and never above two or three, was engag’d lately to go with us to see a Comedy, and we chose that Night on which Volpone, or the Fox, was acted: We gave the Knight timely Notice in the Morning, and he met us punctually at four in the Afternoon at my Chambers, from whence we proceeded

390 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

to Covent Garden Theatre. Our Party consisted of the Knight, Harry Careless and my self. When we had plac’d ourselves to the best Advantage in the Middle of the Pit, Sir Jasper began to discover some Signs of secret Pleasure he receiv’d in seeing the House fill: The Lights, the Musick, the Appearance of Ladies, and the whole Scene of Gaiety put the old Gentleman into an entire good Humour. The Curtain drew up, when I observ’d in the Knight’s Countenance, that earnest Attention which every Man of Sense shou’d shew at an Entertainment from which he expects to be agreeably diverted. Volpone at the opening of the Play, makes this Harangue to his Gold; ——Good Morning to my Gold! Gold, thou dumb God, that giv’st to all Men Tongues That can’st do nought, yet makest Men do all Things, Thou Price of Souls: Ev’n Hell, with thee to boot Is made worth Heaven: Thou art Vertue, Fame, Honour, and all Things else; who can get Thee, He shall be Noble, Valiant, Wise—— [1.1.1, 22–7] Sir Jasper had no sooner heard him, than he whisper’d me softly, a Villain I warrant him, Hal. and as Volpone open’d his Character more to the Audience, added with a seeming Pleasure, I told you so; —I knew nothing but a Rogue cou’d prefer the Love of Gold to the Love of Virtue. At the Lawyer’s bringing a Present, in hopes to be Volpone’s Heir, the Knight by a Wink on me, betray’d his Joy at seeing the Gentleman of the long Robe gull’d by Arts more delusive than his own. The Avarice of Corbaccio in the succeeding Scene, had, I observ’d a different Effect on Sir Jasper from the general Part of the Audience. Corbaccio appear’d a Wretch loaded with all the Infirmities of Nature; but his Deafness, which shew’d his Lust of Money the stronger, while it made every one laugh, Sir Jasper did not once put on a Smile. At the End of the Act he told me, he wonder’d how the Audience cou’d laugh at so miserable a Wretch, who shou’d move their Detestation rather than their Pleasure. On our turning round to speak to Harry Careless, who had placed himself behind us, to our Surprize we found Harry had given us the Slip. While we were studying what could be the Occasion of it, I saw him in one of the Side Boxes, laughing and very gallant with a couple of Ladies: Sir Jasper cry’d, an unaccountable Fellow, when the ceasing of the Musick recall’d our Attention to the Stage. As I was taken up more in observing my Knight than the Players, I view’d narrowly the Change of his Features, as they betray’d the Emotions of his Heart. He seem’d very little affected with Volpone’s turning Mountebank, and whisper’d me, he thought it was too long: But in a Scene or two after, he express’d not a little Pleasure in seeing Corvino, a Jealous Covetous Wretch, work’d up by Artifices, and his own surprizing Avarice, to make a voluntary Offer of putting his Wife to bed with Volpone. At the Beginning of the third Act, I overheard the Knight at Mosca’s Soliloquy, muttering to himself—The cunningest Rascal I ever saw—In a following Scene, where Corvino urg’d his Wife to Volpone’s Bed, she pleading all that a Woman of Honour cou’d say, and with Tears enforcing her Prayers, I perceiv’d in Sir Jasper’s Countenance, a deep Concern, which was heighten’d when Volpone was about to force her—But the Moment she was rescued by Bonario, he with a Smile told me that he lik’d the young Spark, and that he was a very honest Fellow, and he hop’d now the Roguery was detected: When Mosca by a new Device gave the whole a different Turn, Sir Jasper seem’d surpriz’d and wonder’d Where it wou’d all end. Our Friend Harry, whom we left in the Side Boxes, was now got behind the Scenes, and had plac’d himself in such a Posture, that the whole Audience had a full View of him. As

BEN JONSON 391

soon as Sir Jasper beheld him in that Situation, whispering to one of the Actresses, he shew’d some Concern, lest in one of his whimsical, unthinking Fits he shou’d enter farther on the Stage, and entertain the Audience with an amorous Interlude; but the Re-entrance of the Players put an End to those Fears. Thro’ the rest of the Play, the Knight by Turns was pitying the falsly accus’d Lady, and that honest young Fellow, who had defended her Honour; and very often disapproving of the Poet’s making Villany so successful. At the unravelling of the Plot, when the Innocence of the Lady and young Gentleman was clear’d; when Volpone and Mosca were caught in the Trap of their own Cunning, and each of the avaricious Knaves was order’d to a proper Punishment by the Decree of the Senate, the Knight in the Ecstacy of his Heart, testify’d his Joy with such a Warmth, as proclaim’d him an honest Man, and a Lover of Vertue.

392

120. William Warburton and Lewis Theobald on Jonson 1734

From Theobald’s seven-volume edition of The Works of Shakespeare (dated 1733, but issued early 1734). (a) From the preface. William Warburton (1698–1779), who collaborated with Theobald on this edition, marked the whole of this passage after the first sentence (along with others in the preface and notes to the edition) as written by himself, in his own copy of the edition, now in the Capell Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. He also used a version of it in his own edition of Shakespeare (The Works of Shakespear (1747), ii, 195). Warburton is warmly acknowledged in the preface as the one to whom Theobald owes ‘no small Part of my best Criticisms upon my Author’ (p. lxvi), but the two men quarrelled shortly afterwards and the acknowledgement is omitted from Theobald’s preface to the 1740 edition of the Works. For a list of the passages in the preface claimed by Warburton, see D.Nichol Smith (ed.), Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare (Glasgow 1903), pp. xlix–xlxn. An additional Word or two naturally falls in here upon the Genius of our Author, as compared with that of Jonson his Contemporary. They are confessedly the greatest Writers our Nation could ever boast of in the Drama. The first, we say, owed all to his prodigious natural Genius; and the other a great deal to his Art and Learning. This, if attended to, will explain a very remarkable Appearance in their Writings. Besides those wonderful Masterpieces of Art and Genius, which each has given Us; They are the Authors of other Works very unworthy of them: But with this Difference; that in Jonson’s bad Pieces we don’t discover one single Trace of the Author of the Fox and Alchemist: but in the wild extravagant Notes of Shakespeare, you every now and then encounter Strains that recognize the divine Composer. This Difference may be thus accounted for. Jonson, as we said before, owing all his Excellence to his Art, by which he sometimes strain’d himself to an uncommon Pitch, when at other times he unbent and play’d with his Subject, having nothing then to support him, it is no wonder he wrote so far beneath himself. But Shakespeare, indebted more largely to Nature, than the Other to acquired Talents, in his most negligent Hours could never so totally divest himself of his Genius, but that it would frequently break out with astonishing Force and Splendor. (i, xxxiii–xxxiv) (b) From the notes to The Tempest. There are frequent references to Jonson’s works in Theobald’s notes in the editon, mainly to support readings of particular passages.

394 BEN JONSON

Theobald’s known interest in Jonson extends from his first Censor series in 1715 (see No. 109, above) to a letter to Thomas Birch in 1737 answering biographical queries about Jonson (see John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (1817), ii, 654–6). In the second edition of the Works (1740) the references to Jonson quoted below are omitted. Servant-Monster.] [3.2.4] The Part of Caliban has been esteem’d a signal Instance of the Copiousness of Shakespeare’s Invention; and that he had shewn an Extent of Genius, in creating a Person which was not in Nature. And for this, as well as his other magical and ideal Characters, a just Admiration has been paid him. I can’t help taking notice, on this Occasion, of the Virulence of Ben. Jonson, who in the Induction to his Bartlemew Fair, has endeavour’d to throw Dirt, not only at this single Character, but at this whole Play. ‘If there be never a Servant Monster in the Fair, who can help it, (he says,) nor a Nest of Anticks? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Plays, like Those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries, to mix his Head with other Mens Heels’ [ll. 127–31]. Shakespeare, as the Tradition runs, was the Person who first brought Jonson upon the Stage; and this is the Stab we find given in Requital for such a Service, when his Benefactor was retreated from the Scene. A Circumstance, that strangely aggravates the Ingratitude. But this surly Sauciness was familiar with Ben; when the Publick were ever out of Humour at his Performances, he would revenge it on them, by being out of Humour with those Pieces which had best pleas’d them. —I’ll only add, that his Conduct in This was very contradictory to his cooler Professions, ‘that if Men would impartially look towards the Offices and Functions of a Poet, they would easily conclude to themselves the Impossibility of any Man’s being the good Poet, without first being a good Man’ [Volp., preface, ll. 20–4]. (i, 44) [Theobald has quoted EMI, 2.3.342–51, to illustrate The Tempest 3.3.48, ‘Each putter-out of five for one’.] …Ben. to heighten the Ridicule of those projecting Voyagers, makes Puntarvolo’s Wife averse to accompany him, and so he is forc’d to put out his Venture on the Return of himself, his Dog, and his Cat. —Let me conclude with observing on the different Conduct of the Two Poets. Shakespeare (perhaps, out of a particular Deference for Sir W.Raleigh) only sneers these adventurous Voyagers obliquely, and, as it were, en passant: The surly Ben, who would be tyed up by no such scrupulous Regards, dresses up the Fashion in the most glaring Colours of Comic Humour; or, rather, brings down his Satire to the Level of Farcical Ridicule. (i, 50–1)

121. Alexander Pope on Jonson’s inflated popular reputation 1737

From The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated. Pope is impatient with the uncritical admiration for Jonson and other ‘classick’ authors which leaves no room for other poets. Jonson’s standing is a matter for patriotic protestation (ll. 41–2) and his ‘Art’, and Shakespeare’s ‘Nature’, are mindless clichés (ll. 81–3) —ones which Pope had put into the mouth of the Goddess Dulness (The Dunciad (1729), 2.216). There is another (obscure) reference to ‘old Ben’ later in the imitation of Horace’s epistle (ll. 388–9). Some of Pope’s notes have been omitted in the text given below. [‘Horace’ has been eulogizing his sovereign.] Just in one instance, be it yet confest Your People, Sir, are partial in the rest. Foes to all living worth except your own, And Advocates for Folly dead and gone. Authors, like Coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer’s worst ribaldry is learn’d by rote, And beastly⋆ Skelton Heads of Houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen; A Scot will fight for† Christ’s Kirk o’ the Green; And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the‡ Devil. (ll. 31–42; p. 3) ⋆⋆⋆ Shakespear$, (whom you and ev’ry Play-house bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, wing’d his roving flight, And grew Immortal in his own despight. Ben, old and poor, as little seem’d to heed The Life to come, in ev’ry Poet’s Creed. Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forgot his Epic, nay Pindaric Art, But still I love the language of his Heart.

396 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

‘Yet surely, surely, these were famous men! What Boy but hears the saying of old Ben? In all debates where Criticks bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Johnson’s Art, Of Shakespear’s Nature, and of Cowley’s Wit; How Beaumont’s Judgment check’d what Fletcher writ; How Shadwell|| hasty, Wycherly was slow; But, for the Passions, Southern sure and Rowe. These, only these, support the crouded stage, From eldest Heywood down to Cibber’s age.’ (ll. 69–88; p. 5) NOTES • Skelton, Poet Laureat to Hen. 8. a Volume of whose Verses has been lately reprinted, consisting almost wholly of Ribaldry, Obscenity, and Billingsgate Language. † Christ’s Kirk o’ the Green, a Ballad made by a King of Scotland. ‡ The Devil Tavern, where Ben. Johnson held his Poetical Club. $ Shakespear and Ben. Johnson may truly be said not much to have thought of Immortal Fame, the one in many pieces composed in haste for the Stage; the other in his Latter works in general, which Dryden calls his Dotages. || Shadwell hasty, Wycherly was slow.] Nothing was less true than this particular: But this Paragraph has a mixture of Irony, and must not altogether be taken for Horace’s own Judgment, only the common Chatt of the pretenders to Criticism; in some things right, in others wrong: as he tells us in his answer, Interdum vulgus rectum videt, est ubi peccat. [‘At times the public see straight; sometimes they make mistakes’: Epistles, 2.1.63.]

122. Algernon Sidney on Catiline 1739

From a letter to The Daily Gazeteer, no. 1209, 7 May 1739. Sidney, replying to Caleb D’ Anvers in The Craftsman for 28 April 1739, aims to demonstrate that tragedies are instructive to the present as well as reflecting the societies which produced them. He quotes also from Rowe’s version of Tamburlaine, Addison’s Cato, Otway’s Caius Marius, and other more recent plays. SIR, Temple, Saturday, April 28. I am not a little pleas’d to find Mr. D’Anvers advance a Sentiment in which I can chearfully agree with him; for it is certainly true, as he (on this Occasion very justly) observes, That the Sentiments of the Government, and of the People also, may, in a great Degree, be traced in our Tragedies both ancient and modern; and it must be lamented, as one of the many Misfortunes of the Reign of King Charles II. that more than Half the Plays then permitted to appear, breathe nothing but arbitrary Sway, indefeasable Hereditary Succession, &c. for Freedom; the Liberty there recommended being more properly a scandalous Licentiousness, as is but too evident from the Libertinism and Immorality that abounds in all the favourite Plays of that Reign. I must, nevertheless, own, that I cannot well apprehend what Mr. D’Anvers would say, by asserting, ‘That in Times of publick Prosperity, the Tragick Scenes are adorn’d with the warmest Sentiments that publick Spirit can inspire, and the noblest Panegyrick upon those who make the Love of Mankind the glorious Motive of their Undertakings; but if Pride and Meanness fill the Throne, then the Poet arms his Numbers with the infamous Wretches of former Ages, &c.’ —Since a Tragick Hero must necessarily have an opposite Character, without which he cannot appear to any considerable Advantage; and we find this so universally the Sense of our Dramatick Writers, that scarce one Tragedy can be produced as an Exception to this Rule: Wherefore I am apt to believe that Caleb can only have said this to make his subsequent Quotations read with the more Attention; for he must know, whatever single Sentences he may pick out to please his prejudiced Imagination, that a Villain is, in several of our best Plays, the principal, and in many the favourite Character, especially in our old Tragedies, and more particularly in the Writings of the celebrated Shakespear. Our facetious Countryman, BEN JOHNSON, has furnished the Stage with many Lessons of lasting Use: One of which, in his well-written Tragedy of CATALINE’S CONSPIRACY, gives a most lively Representation of a desperate, disappointed Traytor in the following Lines.

398 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

It is decreed. Nor shall thy Fate, O! Rome, Resist my Vow. Tho’ Hills were set on Hills, And Seas met Seas to guard thee, I would through: ————I’d plough up Rocks steep as the Alps in Dust, And lave the Tyrrhene Waters into Clouds, But I would reach thy Head, thy Head, proud City! The Ills that I have done cannot be safe But by attempting greater; and I feel A Spirit within me chides my sluggish Hands, And says they have been innocent too long. [1.73–82] What modern Address to the People by the Conspirators of our Days can be described with more Strength and Exactness than in the following Lines of Cataline’s Harangue to the Roman Mob? in which I think Ben has given us the whole modern Cajole in Epitome. ————Noblest Romans! If you were less, or that your Faith and Virtue Did not hold good that Title, with your Blood, I should not now unprofitably spend Myself in Words, or catch at empty Hopes, By airy Ways for solid Certainties. But since in many and the greatest Dangers I still have known you no less true than valiant. — When I forethink the hard Conditions Our State must undergo, unless in Time We do redeem ourselves to Liberty, And break the Iron Yoke forg’d for our Necks; For what less can we call it, when we see The Commonwealth engross’d so by a few, The Giants of the State, that do by Turns Enjoy her. They have Choice of Houses, Manors, Lordships, We scarce a Fire, or a poor Houshold Lar. They buy rare Attick Statues, Tyrian Hangings, Ephesian Pictures, and Corinthian Plate! [1.326–33, 342–9, 382–5] These Lines in the Mouth of a profligate Voluptuary, who having been employ’d one Part of his Life in ruining his own Fortune, bent his Thoughts on nothing but the Ruin of his Country, shew how clearly the Author saw into the Nature of such Designs, and the common Language on such Occasions, among the Craftsmen, and false Patriots of Rome, or any other Country; for where the Intentions are the same, the Language will always bear an Affinity; whence it is no Wonder that Cataline should speak so much in the Style of our modern Patriots; and such was the Influence he had among the unthinking Vulgar, that the Endeavours of this profligate Traitor would probably have involved the whole Roman People in the Ruin he and his desperate Adherents intended, had not the Wisdom of CICERO, aided by Cato, and the other Friends of Virtue, Liberty, and of their Country, by mild Entreaty, and the Help of their own Examples, (though at the utmost Peril of themselves) stem’d the wide Torrent of Confusion that was on the Verge of their Freedom and Privileges, their Liberties and Lives. Which may ever serve as a Caution to all real Friends of a Nation, to weigh deliberately the Complaints raised against the Persons intrusted with the Government of

BEN JONSON 399

Publick Affairs, and carefully to consider who it is that raises them, and what Views they have in any proposed Alteration. The Expression of Cethegus, on drinking Blood to seal their dark Contract against their Countrymen, is perfectly agreable to Speeches of a much later Date, in which the Envy of designing Traytors to the Friends of the Country they sought to destroy, has often swam uppermost, spite of all their Arts to conceal it, by their pretended Regard for the People. ———Swell me my Bowl yet fuller, Here I do drink this, as I would do Cato’s Or the new Fellow Cicero’s. [1.499–501] The Advantages promis’d to those who would assist his black Schemes, are well described by Cataline in the following Lines. That House is yours, that Land is his; those Waters, Orchards and Walks a third’s; he has that Honour, And he that Office [1.458–60] Cicero’s Description of the Office he enjoy’d, with a View only to the Welfare of his Country, well deserves our Notice; Great Honours are great Burthens; but on whom They’re cast with Envy, he doth wear two Loads. His Cares must still be double to his Joys, In any Dignity, where, if he err, He finds no Pardon; and for doing well, A most small Praise, and that wrung out by Force. [3.1–6] And the Cares attending, and the Capacity necessary for the great Trusts he enjoy’d, are very beautifully and elegantly described by Cato in the same Play. ———Each petty Hand Can steer a Ship becalm’d; but he that will Govern and carry her to her Ends, must know His Tides, his Currents, how to shift his Sails; What she will bear in foul, what in fair Weathers; Where her Springs are, her Leaks, and how to stop them; What Sands, what Shelves, what Rocks, do threaten her; The Forces and the Natures of all Winds, Gusts, Storms, and Tempests, when her Keel ploughs Hell, And Deck knocks Heaven: Then to manage her Becomes the Name and Office of a Pilot. [3.64–74] Which Description alone is sufficient to shew how unfit an ancient or modern Cataline, led by the single View of his own Interests, and hurried on by the Impetuosity of his Passions, must be for so great a Charge. Cicero’s Appeal to the misled Tools of the Faction is equally just and pathetick. If you would hear, and change your savage Minds Leave to be mad; forsake your Purposes Of Treason, Rapine, Murder, Fire and Horror: The Commonwealth hath Eyes, that wake as sharply Over her Life, as yours do for her Ruin. Be not deceived to think her Lenity Will be perpetual; or, if Men be wanting, The Gods will be to such a calling Cause. Consider your Attempts, and while there’s Times,

400 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Repent you of them. It doth make me tremble There should those Spirits breathe, that when they cannot Live honestly would rather perish basely. [3.815–26]

123. Henry Fielding on Jonson 1740, 1742

(a) From the opening essay in The Champion; Or, British Mercury, no. 53, 15 March 1740. Fielding goes on to discuss excesses of modesty in women, of ‘Civility or Complacence’, of friendship and love, of zeal in doctors and of exuberance in poets. Excessit Medecina Modum. —LUCAN1 It will be found, I believe, a pretty just Observation, that many more Vices and Follies arrive in the World through Excess than Neglect. Passion hurries ten Men beyond the Mark, for one whom Indolence holds short of it. As there never was a better Rule for the Conduct of human Life than what is conveyed in that excellent short Sentence—Ne quid nimis,2 so is there none so seldom observed. No Character is oftener represented on the Stage of the World than that of Justice Overdo in the Nest of Fools, Men often become ridiculous or odious by over-acting even a laudable Part: Virtue itself by growing too exuberant, and (if I may be allowed the Metaphor) by running to Seed changes its very Nature, and becomes a most pernicious Weed of a most beautiful Flower. (b) From the preface to The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, published in February 1742. The only Source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is Affectation. But tho’ it arises from one Spring only, when we consider the infinite Streams into which this one branches, we shall presently cease to admire at the copious Field it affords to an Observer. Now Affectation proceeds from one of the these two Causes, Vanity, or Hypocrisy: for as Vanity puts us on affecting false Characters, in order to purchase Applause; so Hypocrisy sets us on an Endeavour to avoid Censure by concealing our Vices under an Appearance of their opposite Virtues. And tho’ these two Causes are often confounded, (for they require some Difficulty in distinguishing;) yet, as they proceed from very different Motives, so they are as clearly distinct in their Operations: for indeed, the Affectation which arises from Vanity is nearer to Truth than the other; as it hath not that violent Repugnancy of Nature to struggle with, which that of the Hypocrite hath. It may be likewise noted, that Affectation doth not imply an absolute Negation of those Qualities which are affected: and therefore, tho’, when it proceeds from Hypocrisy, it be nearly allied to Deceit; yet when it comes from Vanity only, it partakes of the Nature of Ostentation: for instance, the Affectation of Liberality in a vain Man, differs visibly from the same Affectation in the Avaricious; for tho’ the vain Man is not what he would appear, or hath

402 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

not the Virtue he affects, to the degree he would be thought to have it; yet it sits less aukwardly on him than on the avaricious Man, who is the very Reverse of what he would seem to be. From the Discovery of this Affectation arises the Ridiculous—which always strikes the Reader with Surprize and Pleasure; and that in a higher and stronger Degree when the Affectation arises from Hypocrisy, than when from Vanity: for to discover any one to be the exact Reverse of what he affects, is more surprizing, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the Quality he desires the Reputation of. I might observe that our Ben Johnson, who of all Men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used the hypocritical Affectation. (xii–xiv) (c) From the preface and notes to Plutus, The God of Riches, a translation of Aristophanes’ play published by Fielding and the Reverend William Young (the original of Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews) in May 1742. The part of the preface from which this extract comes and the notes would seem to be Fielding’s: see Wilbur L.Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, Conn. 1918), i, 364–5. [Fielding has discussed exchanges of ‘pleasantry’ in Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Husband. ‘Our laureate’ is Colley Cibber.] This sort of Stuff, which is, I think, called genteel Comedy, and in which our Laureate succeeded so excellently well both as Author and Actor, had some Years ago taken almost sole Possession of our Stage, and banished Shakespear, Fletcher, Johnson, &c. from it; the last of whom, of all our English Poets, seems chiefly to have studied and imitated Aristophanes, which we have remarked more than once in our Notes. To such therefore of our Readers, whose Palates are vitiated with the theatrical Diet I have above-mentioned, I would recommend a Play or two of Johnson’s, to be taken as a kind of Preparative before they enter on this Play; for otherwise the Simplicity of its Style, for want of being sweetned with modern Quaintness, may like old Wine after Sugar-Plumbs, appear insipid, and without any Flavour. But our Readers of a purer Taste and sounder Judgment, will be able, we apprehend, to digest good Sense, manly Wit, just Satire, and true Humour, without those Garnishments which we could with infinitely greater Ease have supplied (as others have done) in the room of our Author’s Meaning, than have preserved it in his own plain Simplicity of Stile. (xii) ⋆⋆⋆ [On Plutus, ll. 32–8, Chremylus’ speech explaining that, for the sake of his son, he has sought the oracle to ask if it is better to abandon morals and pursue only selfinterest (and thus get rich).] Ben Johnson, who hath founded two of his best Plays on the Passion of Avarice, seems to have an Eye to this; for he introduces every Man pursuing Riches, on the pretence of doing good to others, or the Public, and disclaiming all selfish Views; one wants to build Hospitals, another for the Propagation of Religion, &c. (5–6) [On Plutus, ll. 245–51, Chremylus’ speech assuring Plutus that he is such a moderate man that he rejoices both in frugality and in expense, and that he loves his wife and his son more dearly than anything in the world—except Plutus.] This whole Speech is admirable, and agreeable to the Character of Chremylus, in which there is a Mixture of Hypocrisy and Drollery. The Conclusion, in which this just and good

BEN JONSON 403

Man professes to love his Wife and Child in Subordination to the Affection he bears for Plutus (or for Wealth) is a Stroke of Nature which every ordinary Reader cannot take. Had such a Sentiment dropt from one of a contrary Disposition, there would be no Humour in it; for true Humour arises from the Contention and Opposition of the Passions. Thus it is the fond, jealous and Italian Husband, who, in Johnson’s Play of the Fox, sacrifices his Wife and his Honour to his Avarice. The Behaviour of Chremylus here, is an Instance of that Insight into Nature, which alone constitutes the true Comic Poet, and of which numberless Examples appear in this our Author. (23–4) NOTES 1 ‘His surgery went beyond all bounds’: Lucan, 2.142. 2 ‘Nothing in excess’.

404

124. Corbyn Morris, humours in Shakespeare and Jonson 1744

From An Essay Towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire and Ridicule, published in May 1744. See Introduction, p. 24. Morris (d. 1779) was a writer on economics and statistics and became commissioner of customs. If you put all these together, it is impossible to hate honest Jack Falstaff; If you observe them again, it is impossible to avoid loving him; He is the gay, the witty, the frolicksome, happy, and fat Jack Falstaff, the most delightful Swaggerer in all Nature—You must love him for your own sake, —At the same time you cannot but love him for his own Talents; And when you have enjoy’d them, you cannot but love him in Gratitude; —He has nothing to disgust you, and every thing to give you Joy; —His Sense and his Foibles are equally directed to advance your Pleasure; And it is impossible to be tired or unhappy in his Company. This jovial and gay Humour, without any thing envious, malicious, mischievous, or despicable, and continually quicken’d and adorn’d with Wit, yields that peculiar Delight, without any Alloy, which we all feel and acknowledge in Falstaff’s Company. —Ben Jonson has Humour in his Characters, drawn with the most masterly Skill and Judgment; In Accuracy, Depth, Propriety, and Truth, he has no Superior or Equal amongst Ancients or Moderns; but the Characters he exhibits are of a satirical, and deceitful, or of a peevish, or despicable Species; as Volpone, Subtle, Morose, and Abel Drugger; In all of which there is something very justly to be hated or despised; And you feel the same Sentiments of Dislike for every other Character of Johnson’s; so that after you have been gratify’d with their Detection and Punishment, you are quite tired and disgusted with their Company: — Whereas Shakespear, besides the peculiar Gaiety in the Humour of Falstaff, has guarded him from disgusting you with his forward Advances, by giving him Rank and Quality; from being despicable by his real good Sense and excellent Abilities; from being odious by his harmless Plots and Designs; and from being tiresome by his inimitable Wit, and his new and incessant Sallies of highest Fancy and Frolick. This discovers the Secret of carrying COMEDY to the highest Pitch of Delight; Which lies in drawing the Persons exhibited, with such chearful and amiable Oddities and Foibles, as you would chuse in your own Companions in real Life; —otherwise, tho’ you may be diverted at first with the Novelty of a Character, and with a proper Detection and Ridicule of it, yet its Peevishness, Meanness, or Immorality, will begin to disgust you after a little Reflection, and

406 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

become soon tiresome and odious; It being certain, that whoever cannot be endured as an accidental Companion in real Life, will never become, for the very same Reasons, a favorite comic Character in the Theatre. This Relish for generous and worthy Characters alone, which we all feel upon the Theatre, where no Biass of Envy, Malice, or personal Resentment draws us aside, seems to be some Evidence of our natural and genuin Disposition to Probity and Virtue; tho’ the Minds of most Persons being early and deeply tinged with vicious Passions, it is no wonder that Stains have been generally mistaken for original Colours. It may be added, that Humour is the most exquisite and delightful when the Oddities and Foibles introduc’d are not mischievous or sneaking, but free, jocund, and liberal; and such as result from a generous Flow of Spirits, and a warm universal Benevolence. (29–31) ⋆⋆⋆ To return—Johnson in his COMIC Scenes has expos’d and ridicul’d Folly and Vice; Shakespear has usher’d in Joy, Frolic and Happiness. — The Alchymist, Volpone and Silent Woman of Johnson, are most exquisite Satires. The comic Entertainments of Shakespear are the highest Compositions of Raillery, Wit and Humour. Johnson conveys some Lesson in every Character, Shakespear some new Species of Foible and Oddity. The one pointed his Satire with masterly Skill; the other was inimitable in touching the Strings of Delight. With Johnson you are confin’d and instructed, with Shakespear unbent and dissolv’d in Joy. Johnson excellently concerts his Plots, and all his Characters unite in the one Design, Shakespear is superior to such Aid or Restraint; His Characters continually sallying from one independent Scene to another, and charming you in each with fresh Wit and Humour. It may be further remark’d, that Johnson by pursuing the most useful Intention of Comedy, is in Justice oblig’d to hunt down and demolish his own Characters. Upon this Plan he must necessarily expose them to your Hatred, and of course can never bring out an amiable Person. His Subtle, and Face are detected at last, and become mean and despicable. Sir Epicure Mammon is properly trick’d, and goes off ridiculous and detestable. The Puritan Elders suffer for their Lust of Money, and are quite nauseous and abominable; And his Morose meets with a severe Punishment, after having sufficiently tir’d you with his Peevishness. —But Shakespear, with happier Insight, always supports his Characters in your Favour. His Justice Shallow withdraws before he is tedious; The French Doctor, and Welch Parson, go off in full Vigour and Spirit; Ancient Pistoll indeed is scurvily treated; however, he keeps up his Spirits, and continues to threaten so well, that you are still desirous of his Company; and it is impossible to be tir’d or dull with the gay unfading Evergreen Falstaff. But in remarking upon the Characters of Johnson, it would be unjust to pass Abel Drugger without notice; This is a little, mean, sneaking, sordid Citizen, hearkening to a Couple of Sharpers, who promise to make him rich; they can scarcely prevail upon him to resign the least Tittle he possesses, though he is assur’d, it is in order to get more; and your Diversion arises, from seeing him wrung between Greediness to get Money, and Reluctance to part with any for that Purpose. His Covetousness continually prompts him to follow the Conjurer, and puts him at the same Time upon endeavouring to stop his Fees. All the while he is excellently managed, and spirited on by Face. However, this Character upon the whole is mean and despicable, without any of that free spirituous jocund Humour abounding in Shakespear. But having been strangely exhibited upon the Theatre, a few Years ago, with odd Grimaces and extravagant Gestures, it has been raised into more Attention than it justly deserved; It is however to be acknowledg’d, that Abel has no

BEN JONSON 407

Hatred, Malice or Immorality, not any assuming Arrogance, Pertness or Peevishness; And his eager Desire of getting and saving Money, by Methods he thinks lawful, are excusable in a Person of his Business; He is therefore not odious or detestable, but harmless and inoffensive in private Life; and from thence, correspondent with the Rule already laid down, he is the most capable of any of Johnson’s Characters, of being a Favourite on the Theatre. It appears, that in Imagination, Invention, Jollity and gay Humour, Johnson had little Power; But Shakespear unlimited Dominion. The first was cautious and strict, not daring to sally beyond the Bounds of Regularity. The other bold and impetuous, rejoicing like a Giant to run his Course, through all the Mountains and Wilds of Nature and Fancy. It requires an almost painful Attention to mark the Propriety and Accuracy of Johnson, and your Satisfaction arises from Reflection and Comparison; But the Fire and Invention of Shakespear in an Instant are shot into your Soul, and enlighten and chear the most indolent Mind with their own Spirit and Lustre. —Upon the whole, Johnson’s Compositions are like finished Cabinets, where every Part is wrought up with the most excellent Skill and Exactness; — Shakespear’s like magnificent Castles, not perfectly finished or regular, but adorn’d with such bold and magnificent Designs, as at once delight and astonish you with their Beauty and Grandeur. (33–6)

408

125. David Garrick, the acting of Drugger and Macbeth 1744

From An Essay on Acting (1744). On Garrick, see Introduction, p. 19. He is impersonating one of his more obtuse critics. If an Actor, and a favourite Actor, in assuming these different Characters with the same Passions, shall unskilfully differ only in Dress, and not in Execution; and supposing him right in One, and of consequence absolutely ridiculous in the Other. Shall this Actor, I say, in Spite of Reason, Physicks, and common Observation, be caress’d, applauded, admir’d? But to illustrate it more by Example. —Suppose the Murder of Duncan, and the Breaking a Urinal shall affect the Player in the same Manner, and the only Difference is the blue Apron and lac’d Coat, shall we be chill’d at the Murderer, and roar at the tobacconist? Fie for shame! — As the One must be absolutely the Reverse of Right, I think the Publick, for so gross an Imposition, should drive both off the Stage. When Drugger becomes Macbeth, and Macbeth Drugger, I feel for the Manes of the Immortal Shakespear, and Inimitable Ben; I bemoan the Taste of my Country, and I would have the Buffoon sacrific’d to appease the Muses, and restore us to a true Dramatick Taste, by such an exemplary Piece of Justice. I shall now, as relative to my present Subject, describe in what Manner the two abovemention’d Characters ought to be mentally and corporeally Agitated, under the different Circumstances of the Dagger, and Urinal; and by that shall more fully delineate what is meant by Passions and Humours. When Abel Drugger has broke the Urinal, he is mentally absorb’d with the different Ideas of the invaluable Price of the Urinal, and the Punishment that may be inflicted in Consequence of a Curiosity, no way appertaining or belonging to the Business he came about. Now, if this, as it certainly is, [is] the Situation of his Mind, How are the different Members of the Body to be agitated? Why Thus, —His Eyes must be revers’d from the Object he is most intimidated with, and by dropping his Lip at the same time to the Object, it throws a trembling Languor upon every Muscle, and by declining the right Part of the Head towards the Urinal, it casts the most comic Terror and Shame over all the upper Part of the Body, that can be imagin’d; and to make the lower Part equally ridiculous, his Toes must be inverted from the Heel, and by holding his Breath, he will unavoidably give himself a Tremor in the Knees, and if his Fingers, at the same Time, seem convuls’d, it finishes the compleatest low Picture of Grotesque Terror that can be imagin’d by a Dutch Painter. —Let this be compar’d with the modern copies, and then let the Town judge. (6–8) [He goes on to describe Macbeth in the immediate consciousness of having murdered Duncan.]

410

126. Sarah Fielding, David Simple hears a critic on Shakespeare and Jonson 1744

From The Adventures of David Simple, Book ii, chapter 3. Simple has been promised by his guide Mr Spatter a sample of criticism done entirely from memory by a man whose opinions are all borrowed from a longsuffering ‘man of sense’. Sarah was Fielding’s third sister, and wrote six novels before her death in 1768. Henry revised the Adventures for a second edition, also published in 1744, and added a preface. ‘Shakespeare, whose Name is immortal, had an Imagination which had the Power of Creation, a Genius which could form new Beings, and make a Language proper for them. Ben Johnson, who writ at the same time, had a vast deal of true Humour in his Comedies, and very fine Writing in his Tragedies; but then he is a laborious Writer, a great many of those beautiful Speeches in Sejanus and Catiline are Translations from the Classicks, and he can by no means be admitted into any Competition with Shakespeare. But I think any Comparison between them ridiculous; for what Mr. Addison says of Homer and Virgil, That reading the Iliad is like travelling through a Country uninhabited, where the Fancy is entertain’d with a thousand savage Prospects of vast Desarts, —wide uncultivated Marshes, —huge forests, —mis-shapen Rocks and Precipices: — On the contrary, the Æneid is like a well-order’d Garden, where it is impossible to find out any Part unadorn’d or to cast our Eyes upon a single Spot that does not produce some beautiful Plant or Flower.1 is equally applicable to Shakespeare and Ben Johnson; so that to say that the one or the other writes best, is like saying of a Wilderness, that it is not a regular Garden; or, of a regular Garden, that it does not run out into that Wildness which raises the Imagination, and is to be found in Places where only the Hand of Nature is to be seen. In my Opinion, the same thing will hold as to Corneille and Racine: Corneille is the French Shakespeare, and Racine their Ben Johnson. The Genius of Corneille, like a fiery Courser, is hard to be restrain’d; while Racine goes on in a majestick Pace, and never turns out of the Way, either to the Right or Left.’ (i, 162–3) NOTE 1 From The Spectator, no. 417, 28 June 1712.

412

127. William Guthrie, Jonson the Poussin of drama 1747

From An Essay upon English Tragedy (1747). The Essay is mainly a defence of what Guthrie calls ‘the sterling merit of Shakespear’ against ‘the tinsel ornaments of the French academy’ (p. 10). Guthrie (1708–70) reported Parliamentary debates for The Gentleman’s Magazine (which Samuel Johnson then revised), and later published histories of England (1744–51), of the world (1764–7), and of Scotland (1767). Long before the French had illuminated all Europe with the true rules of the drama, our Johnson knew and practised them to a greater perfection than the most distinguishing academician ever wrote of them in speculation—Johnson, at a time when critical learning was as strange in France as in Barbary, did what no Frenchman ever was able to do. He produced regular plays of five acts, complete in the unities of place and characters, and so complete in the unity of time, that they are acted upon the stage in the same time which the same story would have taken up in real life. Where then is the merit of the French critical discoveries when an Englishman has so much the start of their academy, and such advantages in the execution? But Johnson had an understanding which raised him next to genius. He was in the drama what Pousin is in painting. He studied the works of the antients to so much perfection, that his drawing, though dry, is always correct; and his attitudes, however uncouth, are always just. Hence, whatever he took from living manners, (of which he was sparing) was complete in its kind; while his force of judgment, and observation of proportion, give a warmth, sometimes, to his colouring, as pleasing as when it is the result of nature itself. Pardon this digression in favour of a poet, whom I admire rather than love: But who is so unequal to himself, that when he rambles from that severity which is so peculiar to himself, you cannot find in Johnson the smallest vestige of his merit; so entirely was he supported upon the stilts of close observation of nature, and strict application to study. Even the bird of nature, Shakespear, when he neither soars to elevation, not sinks to meanness, flies with balanced pinions; he skims the level of dramatic rules; and his Merry Wives of Windsor demonstrates how much he acted against his better judgment, when he stretched his wings into the extravagance of popular prepossessions. (6–7)

414

128. Unsigned review of La Place’s Catiline 1747

In the Journal de Trévoux for August 1747. Translated. The translation of Catiline appears in volume v of Pierre Antoine la Place’s Le Théâtre Anglois (‘Londres’ 1746–9). On La Place’s much abridged version of the original, see Nicole Bonvalet, ‘Adaptations et traductions de Ben Jonson au XVIIIe siècle’, Les Lettres Romanes (1981), xxxv, 205–12. In the first four volumes, M. de la Place has acquinted us perfectly with the genius of Shakespeare. The plays of Othello, Henry VI, Cymbeline, etc. have left us with a very elevated impression of this founder of the British stage. In spite of his faults, his lack of order, of education, this man has appeared to us very remarkable. If he is dismal in his failures, in his high points he is sublime; in his coups de théâtre he is admirable. But can one say the same thing of his successors, and in proportion as art has polished the English drama, has not the genius of its authors cooled? Once again this is a question which our readers can resolve for themselves, when we have described the plays contained in this volume. The first is by Ben Jonson, who only ever wrote two tragedies, Catiline and Sejanus. M. de la Place gives an analysis of the first; that is to say, he translates most of its scenes, and simply gives the plan and groundwork of some others. This is the judicious method adopted throughout his work. Ben Jonson was without doubt more learned and better instructed in the rules than Shakespeare. In creating his tragedy about Catiline, he had his eye on Sallust and on Cicero. He took pains to reduce the action to the duration of a day or so. Although the scene is not always restricted to the same building, it remains fixed in Rome. Of course the art of implications, of situations, of interested motives was not unknown to this author, and for all these reasons, the play deserves true praise; but does it ever rise as high as Shakespeare? Does it give to its principal characters that elevation of sentiments which is the soul of a tragic scene? Does it terrify, does it transport with its catastrophes all of action, all of terror? Let us follow a little of Catiline through the analysis of M. de la Place. We do not think that it is necessary to describe at length the play’s subject: it is the conspiracy of this evil citizen. He appears with his confidants Lentulus and Cethegus; he is betrayed by Fulvia, who reveals the whole plot to Cicero. This consul here acts the same character as in his Catiline orations. Cato and Caesar are depicted here according to Sallust’s account. The dénouement is that Lentulus and Cethegus are punished by death and Catiline is defeated by Anthony.

416 BEN JONSON

M. de la Place only translates into verse the the first scene of the first act, and it is one of the finest. The ghost of Sylla appears, it laments the peace which reigns in Rome, it breathes its terrors into Catiline. [Quotes 1.1.1–10 from the translation.] If Shakespeare had to depict an illustrious Roman, lost in debauchery, ambitious, a villain, powerful, enemy of his country, in a word Catiline, what superiority would he not have given to this character over that of Cethegus who was only there as a follower, who is only in the capacity of an accomplice! However here we see Cethegus the most decided, the most urgent of all the conspirators. He is the first at the rendezvous, he accuses the others of laziness, he forces Catiline himself into action. [Cites the action of 1.5.499–502 and 3.4.174–96.] It will be admitted that there Cethegus is active, quite unlike Catiline, who nevertheless ought to be the hero of the play; and it is the same thing everywhere. Catiline harangues too much, he is almost as much of a talker as Cicero; and Cicero is here of a prolixity to make the spectators die of boredom. This is another fault of this play; the author has translated the Catiline orations almost whole; the Quosque tandem1 and all that follows. Cethegus, exasperated by the length of his harangues, says somewhere to the Consul: if the conspiracy had not been discovered, ‘your role would not have been as long as it is now: I would have cut the flow of your brilliant rhetoric from the first sentence’.2 This is a little comic; but as he is depicted here, Cicero also merits this attack; he even merits the title of ‘talker’ which Sempronia gives him (Act II Scene ii [l. 108]). Let us touch on a third fault of this tragedy. Lentulus, another friend of Catiline, is a man without resolution, without a soul. He amuses himself (Act I Scene iv [ll. 254–86]) by discussing the prophecies and the responses of Auruspices. However it is to him that Catiline assigns the Roman Empire, he is content, for himself and for his other accomplices, with dividing up the distant provinces. Is that really in the nature of things? History, it is true, has hinted that such was Catiline’s policy; but should not a dramatic poet change some traits of his characters? There are some other characters in the same play who are not adequately depicted: in Sallust Sempronia is a famous intriguer, full of tricks and boldness, abusing a thousand talents to satisfy her passions, knowing how to use crime and the appearance of virtue, etc. In the historian this portrait is a finished one; here in the play everything is feeble, and poorly nuanced; the character of Fulvia seems better sustained. The latter is a greedy and skilful woman: she dupes Quintus Curius, she discovers the secret of the conspiracy, and this fellow Curius shows himself to be as he really is, lascivious and stupid. [Cites 2.3.312–21.] There we see an indiscreet man who lays himself open to the questions of a very subtle woman; thus the whole plot is soon exposed; and Fulvia, for whom a secret is an insupportable weight, will tell everywhere the circumstances of the plot. Cicero, let us say once again, does not make a great enough impression in this play. His discoursing as far as the eye can see stifles feeling and action. But it is doubtless ridiculous

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 417

that, in Act III Scene xv, when the conspirators come to stab him, he shows himself at the window and from there makes a harangue which obliges Cato to tell him, ‘You talke too much to ’hem, MARCUS’ [l. 827]. Does a Consul have to throw in his lot with scoundrels? Does he not have lictors who can arrest them? Cato has also something of the burgomaster about him. He says to Cicero, ‘raise the city’ [l. 834]; and where is the character to be placed? Cicero is at the window: the conspirators are making a row at the door: the porter refuses to open it; the Consul gives his harangue, and Cato tells him to have the wretches arrested. So he is also at the window, because in the street he would have run the risk of being killed by Catiline’s accomplices. But are all these situations really dramatic, really worthy of the buskin? We pass over other places which would be hissed at with us. Let us agree however that there is something fine in Act V Scene iv where the Allobroges confront Cethegus and the other conspirators; that the harangues of Caesar and of Cato are magnificent; that the character of the former, above all, is well handled. Also the author had an excellent model in Sallust. To us Ben Jonson seems in general not to be an inventive author, to be hardly capable of moving an audience: M. de la Place does a service in suppressing licentious passages and platitudes, not to mention that this play is as well written in our language as it is possible to be. (1543–54) NOTES 1 ‘In heaven’s name, how long’: Cicero, In Catilinam, 1.1.1. 2 Cp. Cat. 5.272–7.

418

129. Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare and Jonson 1747

From the ‘Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick’, printed in Prologue and Epilogue Spoken at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury Lane 1747. Judging by the quotations in his Dictionary, Johnson was familiar with Jonson’s songs and lyrics, and with Catiline, Sejanus, Every Man in his Humour, and The New Inn, as well as his translations, but seems nowhere to have mentioned The Alchemist, The Silent Woman or Volpone: see W.B.C.Watkins, Johnson and English Poetry Before 1660 (Princeton, NJ 1936), passim. Johnson comments unfavourably on Jonson’s translation of Horace in his life of Dryden (Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (1905), i, 421) and in no. 69 of The Idler, 11 August 1759. When Learning’s Triumph o’er her barb’rous Foes First rear’d the Stage, immortal SHAKESPEAR rose; Each Change of many colour’d Life he drew, Exhausted Worlds, and then imagin’d new: Existence saw him spurn her bounded Reign, And panting Time toil’d after him in vain: His pow’rful Strokes presiding Truth impress’d, And unresisted Passion storm’d the Breast. Then JOHNSON came, instructed from the School, To please in Method, and invent by Rule; His studious Patience, and laborious Art, By regular Approach essay’d the Heart; Cold Approbation gave the ling’ring Bays, For those who durst not censure, scarce cou’d praise. A Mortal born he met the general Doom, But left, like Egypt’s Kings, a lasting Tomb. The Wits of Charles found easier Ways to Fame, Nor wish’d for JOHNSON’S Art, or SHAKESPEAR’S Flame. Themselves they studied, as they felt, they writ, Intrigue was Plot, Obscenity was Wit. Vice always found a sympathetick Friend; They pleas’d their Age, and did not aim to mend. Yet Bards like these aspir’d to lasting Praise, And proudly hop’d to pimp in future Days.

420 BEN JONSON

Their Cause was gen’ral, their Supports were strong, Their Slaves were willing, and their Reign was long; Till Shame regain’d the Post that Sense betray’d, And Virtue call’d Oblivion to her Aid. (ll. 1–28; p. 2)

130. Charles Macklin, a forged pamphlet on Jonson 1748

A letter to The General Advertiser, 23 April 1748. Macklin (1699–1777) was one of the best-known actors of the century; his Shylock at Drury Lane in 1741 was especially successful. His fictitious pamphlet is part of a promotion campaign for the revival of Ford’s The Melancholy Lover which took place at Drury Lane on 28 April for Mrs Macklin’s benefit. There is a letter in The General Advertiser for 19 April puffing Ford and drawing attention to the forthcoming revival. The first of the ‘Invectives’ and the poems by May and Porter are, of course, inventions. See Introduction, p. 29. SIR, The History of the Stage before the Restoration is like a Foreign Land, in which no Englishman had ever travelled: we know there were such things as Play-Houses, and one Shakespear a great Writer, but the Historical Traces of them are so imperfect, that the Manner in which they existed is less known to us, than that of Eschylus, or the Theatres of Greece. For this Reason, ’tis hoped, that the following Gleaning of Theatrical History will readily obtain a Place in your Paper. ’Tis taken from a Pamphlet, written in the Reign of Charles I. with this queint Title, Old Ben’s LIGHT HEART made heavy by Young John’s MELANCHOLLY LOVER; and as it contains some Historical Anecdotes and Altercations, concerning Ben Johnson, Ford, Shakespear, and the Lover’s Melancholly, it is imagined, that a few Extracts from it at this Juncture, will not be unentertaining to the Public. Those who have any Knowledge of the Theatre in the Reigns of James and Charles the First, must know, that Ben Johnson, from great Critical Language which was then the Portion but of very few; his Merit as a Poet, and his constant Association with Men of Letters, did, for a considerable Time give Laws to the Stage. Ben was by Nature splenetic and sour; with a Share of Envy, for every anxious Genius has some, more than was warrantable in Society. By Education rather critically than politely learn’d; all which swell’d his Mind into an Ostentatious Pride of his own Works, and an overbearing, inexorable Judgment of his Contemporaries. This rais’d him many Enemies, who, towards the Close of his Life, endeavoured to drive this Tyrant, as the Pamphlet stiles him, out of the Dominion of the Theatre: And what greatly contributed to their Design was the Sleights and Malignances which the rigid Ben too frequently threw out against the lowly Shakespear; whose Fame, since his Death, as appears by the Pamphlet, was grown too great for Ben’s Envy either to bear with or wound.

422 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

It would greatly exceed the Limits of your Paper, to set down all the Contempts and Invectives, which were uttered and written by Ben, and are collected and produced in this Pamphlet, as unanswerable and shaming Evidences to prove his Ill-Nature and Ingratitude to Shakespear, who first introduced him to the Theatre and Fame. But tho’ the whole of those Invectives cannot be set down at present, some few of the Heads may not be disagreeable, which are as follow, ‘That the Man had Imagination and Wit none could deny, but that they were ever guided by true Judgment in the Rules and Conduct of a Piece, none could with Justice assert, both being ever servile to raise the Laughter of Fools and the Wonder of the Ignorant. That he was a good Poet only in Part—being ignorant of all Dramatic Laws; —had little Latin—less Greek’ —and speaking of Plays To make a⋆ Child, now swaddled, to proceed Man, and then shoot up in one Beard and Weed, Past threescore Years; or with the rusty Swords, And help of some few Foot-and-half-foot Words, Fight over York and Lancaster’s long Jars; And in the Tyring-house bring Wounds to Scars. He rather prays you will be pleas’d to see One such To-day, as other Plays should be; Where neither Chorus† wafts you o’er the Seas — [EMI, Prologue, ll. 7–14] This, and such-like Behaviour, brought Ben at last from being the Law-giver of the Theatre, to be the Ridicule of it; being personally introduced there in several Pieces, to the Satisfaction of the Publick, who are ever fond of encouraging Personal Ridicule, when the Follies or Vices of the Object are supposed to deserve it. But what wounded his Pride and Fame most sensibly was, the Preference which the Public, and most of his Contemporary Wits, gave to FORD’S Lover’s Melancholly before HIS New-Inn, or Light Heart; They were both brought on in the same Week and upon the same Stage; Ben’s was damn’d—Ford’s received with uncommon Applause. And what made this Circumstance still more galling was, that Ford was at the Head of the Partisans who supported Shakespear’s Fame against Ben’s Invectives. This so incens’d old Ben that, as an everlasting Stigma upon his Audience, he prefix’d this Title to his Play—The New-Inn, or LIGHT HEART. A Comedy. As it was never acted— but most negligently play’d by some the King’s idle Servants—and most Squeamishly beheld, and censur’d, by others the King’s most foolish Subjects. This Title is follow’d by an abusive Preface upon the Audience and Reader. Immediately upon this, he wrote his memorable Ode against the Public, beginning Come leave the loathed Stage, And the more loathsome Age. The Revenge he took against Ford was to write an Epigram against him as a Plagerie. Playwright, by chance, hearing some Toys I had writ, Cry’d to my Face—they were th’Elixir of Wit. And I now must believe him, for To-day Five of my Jests‡ pass’d him a Play. [Epig., 100] The next charge of his against Ford was, that the Lover’s Melancholly was not his own; but purloiz’d from Shakespear’s Papers, by the Connivance of Hemings and Condel, who, in Conjunction with Ford, had the Revival of them.

BEN JONSON 423

The Malice of this Charge is gravely refuted, —and afterwards laugh’d at in many Verses and Epigrams, the best of which are those that follow, with which I shall close this Theatrical Extract. To my Worthy Friend John Ford. ’Tis said from Shakespear’s Mine your Play you drew What Need? —when Shakespear still survives in you; But grant it were from his vast Treasury reft, That Plunderer Ben ne’er made so rich a Theft. THOMAS MAY Upon Ben Johnson, and his Zany, Tom Randolph Quoth Ben to Tom the Lover’s stole, ’Tis Shakespear’s every Word. Indeed, says Tom, upon the whole, ’Tis much too good for Ford, Thus Ben and Tom the Dead still praise, The Living to decry; For none must dare to wear the Bays, ’Till Ben and Tom both die. Even Avon’s Swan could not escape These Letter-Tyrant Elves! They on his Fame contrived a Rape, To raise their Pedant Selves. But After-Times with full Consent, This Truth will all acknowledge, Shakespear and Ford from Heav’n were sent But Ben and Tom from Colledge. ENDIM. PORTER The suppos’d Author of these Verses. NOTES • in the Winter’s Tale, † In Harry the Fifth ‡ Alluding to a Character in the Lady’s Trial, which Ben says Ford stole from him.

424

131. Edmund Burke, Jonson and true comedy 1748

From The Reformer, no. 2, 4 February 1748. Burke (1729–97), then in his eighteenth year and in the process of graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, wrote and published thirteen numbers of this weekly journal. This number was devoted to the reform of the Dublin stage. BEN. JOHNSON, of all the Comic-Writers is the only one in whom unite all the Graces of true Comedy without the monstrous Blemishes that stain and disfigure the Merit of the others. He has Wit sufficient, Humour in abundance, and a Judgment not to be match’d by any, since or before him; his Morals are sound, and the way he takes to attack Vice, and Folly, the most efficacious that can be thought to overcome them. In short, had this Man liv’d in the times of Græcian Learning, he might have stood up for the Laurel against the most excellent of them; but his Writings, instead of doing Honour to our Age, will always be a Proof of its Degeneracy, that could neglect such delicious Feasts as his happy Muse has provided for us, to feed on the Garbage of vile, and uninstructive Authors. (3)

426

132. John Upton on Jonson 1749

From Remarks on Three Plays of Benjamin Jonson (1749). The three plays are Volpone, Epicoene, and The Alchemist. In Upton’s Critical Observations on Shakespeare (1746) he attributes Jonson’s comment in his ‘Ode’ on Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin and less Greek’ to ‘jealousy’, adding in a note that ‘’Tis true Johnson says very handsome things of him presently after: for people will allow others any qualities, but those which they highly value themselves for’ (p. 12 and n). (a) From the preface. These cursory remarks on three of the most celebrated Poems (as he himself is pleased to name them) of our ancient and learned Comedian, which are here offered to the reader’s consideration, (to his entertainment, or instruction, I dare not say) were at first written by me, for the most part, on the margin of an edition printed in the year 1640. ’Twas no ungrateful amusement (and this induces me to think ’twill be not less grateful to the reader) to compare JONSON with the original authors, which he imitated; and to find, that whenever he considered with himself, how HORACE, JUVENAL, PLAUTUS, or any other of the ancient writers, would have written on such a subject, or expressed such a sentiment, that then he always excelled himself. And this, perhaps, may account for that inequality we find in his compositions: his good genius seems to have forsaken him, whenever he forsook the guides of antiquity, and trusted to his own natural strength. There is indeed the one thing necessary in all writings, much wanting in the writings of JONSON, and that is, the power to touch the heart: no scholarship (as the word is vulgarly used) can absolutely teach a writer this art; for this he must go to his domestic and inward monitor, and there search for the secret springs and motives of action; what is man, whereto serveth he, what is his good, and what is his evil⋆ ? In a word, he must have the proper feeling, before he can attain to the proper expression, Methinks in this science his contemporary SHAKESPEARE has greatly the preeminence; nor is he at all inferior to JONSON in exhibiting, in ridiculous and various lights, the various follies of mankind. But it ought not to be passed over, without some severer censure, how vainly full, and conceitedly satisfied with himself, we perpetually find our poet; even in such a manner as to mistake his proper talent. The Comic Muse (as he himself expresses it) proving ominous to him, he is resolved to try if the Tragic had a more kind aspect; ‘Where if I prove the pleasure but of one,

428 BEN JONSON

So he judicious be; hee shall b’ alone A theater unto me: once, I’le ’say To strike the eare of time, in those fresh strains, As shall, beside the cunning of their ground, Give cause to some of wonder, some despight, And unto more despaire to imitate their sound.’ [Poet., Apologetical Dialogue, ll. 226–32] Now the aspect of the Tragic Muse was so little favourable to our poet when in buskins, that even in the choice of his subject he failed: SEJANUS and CATILINE are historical characters so well known, that no distress which befalls them, can possibly raise any kind of pity (the chiefest and noblest passion belonging to tragedy) in the breast of the beholder. All shew of learning then becomes the worst kind of pedantry, when substituted in the room of poetic passion, sentiment, and decorum: though in common justice be it spoken of JONSON, that he as seldom fails in the two latter, as he shines in the former. Hence comedy was his proper talent; and his knowledge seems rather to consist in being able to expose those follies, and lesser kind of vices, which render men contemptible; than from a well conducted distress to shew the amiableness, and dignity of a virtuous character. Were the tragic and comic muses thus to preserve their proper rank, and characters, how well are they fitted to answer that great end of profit, and delight? And how absurd are all those kind of men, who blinded by their puritanical pride, and misled by ill-natured spleen, cannot distinguish between things rightly used, and preposterously abused? —But reflections of this nature the reader, at his own leisure, may indulge. Let us return to the subsequent remarks. JONSON has few passages that want correction, but many that want explanation: which is, in a great measure, owing to his allusions, and to his translations of ancient authors. (Sig. A2r–[A4]r) (b) From the commentary on Volpone.

[On Act II, Scene i:] This whole Episode of Sir POLITIQUE WOULDBEE never did, nor ever can please. He seems to be brought in meerly to lengthen out the play. Perhaps too ’tis particular satyre. (25) (c) From the commentary on Epicoene.

[On 3.5.108:] This is a very fine instance of the suspence of character: MOROSE, thro’ the impetuous desire of revenge, for a while, acts out of his real character. (77) [On 4.4.56–8:]

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 429

‘EPI. Lord, how idly he talks, and how his eyes sparkle! he looks greene about the temples! do you see what blue spots he has?’ This is a plain imitation of a passage in the Menæchmi of PLAUTUS: MUL. Viden’ tu illi oculos virere? ut viridis exoritur color, Ex temporibus atque fronte, ut oculi suntillant, vide!1 SHAKESPEARE has this passage in his view in The Comedy of Errors. Act IV [.4.50] ‘Luc. Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks!’ JONSON is always desirous that his imitations should appear; SHAKESPEARE lies more concealed. (88) (d) From the commentary on The Alchemist.

[On 1.1.1–3:] Our poet could not possibly have chosen a happier incident to open his play with: instead of opening with a dull narration, you have action; and such action too, as cannot possibly be supposed to happen at any other time, than this very present time. Two rogues, with their punk, are introduced quarrelling, and just so much of their secrets is discovered to the audience, as is sufficient for the audience at present to know. —The reader too, perhaps, is to be informed, that our learned comedian does not deal in vulgar English expressions, but in vulgar Attic or Roman expressions. [Cites Aristophanes, Plutus, l. 618, and Horace, Satires, 1.9.70, to illustrate Subtle’s ‘I fart at thee’.] (96–7) [On 2.4.31–2:] Nothing can be finer imagined, than this change of Subtle’s behaviour. Fools always admire what they least understand; and characters is the least they are acquainted with. To the voluptuous and wicked MAMMON, SUBTLE appears holiness and humility itself: to the ignorant and devout ANANIAS, he appears all learning and science; to which every other consideration must submit. And all this, very agreeable to the rules of decorum, to excite the admiration and wonder of these various kinds of fools. (112) NOTES • Ecclesiasticus xviii, 9. 1 ‘Wife Do you see how green his eyes are? And that greenish colour coming over his eyes and forehead? How his eyes glitter! Look!’: Menœchmi, ll. 828–9.

430

133. Richard Hurd, on Catiline and on Shakespeare versus Jonson 1749

From the notes to Horace’s Ars Poetica in Hurd’s edition, Q. Horatii Flacci Ars Poetica. Epistola ad Pisones. With an English Commentary and Notes (1749). This text from the second edition of 1753. Hurd (1720–1808) became Bishop of Worcester and a notable literary editor and commentator. (a) Note to Ars Poetica, ll. 131ff: on Horace’s rules for imitation. In order to acquire a property in subjects of this sort, the poet directs us to observe the three following cautions: 1. Not to follow the trite, obvious round of the original work, i.e. not servilely and scrupulously to adhere to its plan or method. 2. Not to be translators, instead of imitators, i.e. if it shall be thought fit to imitate more expressly any part of the original, to do it with freedom and spirit, and without a slavish attachment to the mode of expression. 3. Not to adopt any particular incident, that may occur in the proposed model, which either decency, or the nature of the work would reject. M.Dacier illustrates these rules, which have been conceived to contain no small difficulty, from the Iliad; to which the poet himself refers, and probably not without an eye to particular instances of the errors, here condemned, in the Latin tragedies. For want of these, it may be of use to fetch an illustration from some examples in our own. And we need not look far for them. Almost every modern play affords an instance of one or other of these faults. The single one of Catiline by B.Johnson is, itself, a specimen of them all. This tragedy, which hath otherwise great merit, and on which its author appears to have placed no small value, is, in fact, the Catilinarian war of Salust, put into poetical dialogue, and so offends against the first rule of the poet, in following too servilely the plain beaten round of the Chronicle. 2. Next, the speeches of Cicero and Catiline, of Cato and Cæsar are, all of them, direct and literal translations of the historian and orator, in violation of the second rule, which forbids a too close attachment to the mode, or form of expression. 3. There are several transgressions of that rule, which injoins a strict regard to the nature and genius of the work. One is obvious and striking. In the history, which had, for its subject, the whole Catilinarian war, the fates of the conspirators were distinctly to be recorded, and the preceding debates, concerning the manner of their punishment, afforded an occasion, too inviting to be overlooked by an historian, and above all a republican historian, of embellishing his narration by set harrangues. Hence the long speeches of Cæsar and Cato in the senate have great propriety, and are justly esteemed amongst the leading beauties of that work. But the case was totally different in the drama; which, taking for its subject the single fate of Catiline, had no concern with the

432 BEN JONSON

other conspirators, whose fates at most should only have been hinted at, not debated with all the circumstance and pomp of rhetoric on the stage. Nothing can be more flat and disgusting, than this calm, impertinent pleading; especially in the very heat and winding up of the plot. But the poet was misled by the beauty it appeared to have in the original composition, without attending to the peculiar laws of the drama, and the indecorum it must needs have in so very different a work. (83–5) (b) Note to Ars Poetica, l. 408: on the debate among the ancients over whether good poems are made by art or by nature. Hurd suggests the cause of the dispute is the perennial tendency to deplore whatever taste prevails at the time. Thus, in the case before us, exquisite art and commanding genius, being the two only means of rising to superior literary excellence, in proportion as any age became noted for the one, it was constantly defamed, and the preference given to the other. So, during the growth of letters in any state, when a sublimity of sentiment and strength of expression, make, as, under those circumstances, they always will, the characteristic of the times, the critic, disgusted with the rude workings of nature, affects to admire only the nicer finishings and proportions of art. When, let but the growing experience of a few years refine and perfect the public taste, and what was before traduced as roughness and barbarity, becomes at once nerves, dignity, and force. Then art, is effeminacy; and judgment, want of spirit. All now is rapture and inspiration. The exactest modern compositions are unmanly and unnatural, et solos veteres legendos putant, neque in ullis aliis esse naturalem eloquentiam et robur viris dignum arbitrantur (Quinct. L.X.C.I.).1 The truth of this observation might be justified from many examples. [Hurd cites cases from Greek and Roman literary history.] ⋆⋆⋆ But the observation holds of our own writers. There was a time, when the art of JOHNSON was set above the divinest raptures of SHAKESPEARE. The present age is well convinced of the mistake. And now the genius of SHAKESPEARE is idolized in its turn. Happily for the public taste, it can scarcely be too much so. Yet, should any, in the rage of erecting trophies to the genius of antient poesy presume to violate the recent honours of more correct poets, the cause of such critical perversity will be ever the same. For all admiration of past times, when excessive, is still to be accounted for the same way, Ingeniis non ille favet plauditque sepultis, Nostra sed impugnat, nos nostraque lividus odit.2 (213–15) NOTES 1 ‘And think that only the ancients should be read and hold that they are the sole possessors of natural eloquence and manly vigour’: Quintilian, 10.1.43. 2 ‘That man does not favour and applaud the genius of the dead, but assails ours to-day, spitefully hating us and everything of ours’: Horace, Epistles, 2.1.88–9.

134. Thomas Seward on Jonson, Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher 1750

Preface to his edition of The Works of Mr Francis Beaumont, and Mr John Fletcher (1750), 10 vols. Seward (1708–90) was the Canon of Lichfield and Salisbury, and father of the writer Anna Seward. Coleridge had a low opinion of him as an editor: see the Table Talk for 17 February 1833, The Table Talk and Omniana (1917), p. 212. These Authors are in a direct Mean between Shakespear and Jonson, they do not reach the amazing Rapidity and immortal Flights of the former, but they soar with more Ease and to nobler Heights than the latter; They have less of the Os magna sonans,1 the Vivida Vis Animi,2 the noble Enthusiasm, the Muse of Fire, the terrible Graces of Shakespear, but they have much more of all these than Jonson. On the other hand, in Literature they much excel the former, and are excell’d by the latter; and therefore they are more regular in their Plots and more correct in their Sentiments and Diction than Shakespear, but less so than Jonson. Thus far Beaumont and Fletcher are One, but as hinted above in this they differ; Beaumont studied and follow’d Jonson’s Manner, personiz’d the Passions and drew Nature in her Extremes; Fletcher follow’d Shakespear and Nature in her usual Dress (this Distinction only holds with regard to their Comic Works, for in Tragedies they all chiefly paint from real Life.) Which of these Manners is most excellent may be difficult to say; the former seems most striking, the latter more pleasing, the former shews Vice and Folly in the most ridiculous Lights, the latter more fully shews each Man himself, and unlocks the inmost Recesses of the Heart. Great are the Names of the various Masters who follow’d the one and the other Manner. Jonson, Beaumont and Moliere list on one Side; Terence, Shakespear and Fletcher on the other. ⋆⋆⋆ Beaumont, we said, chiefly studied Books and Jonson; Fletcher, Nature and Shakespear, yet so far was the first from following his Friend and Master in his frequent close and almost servile Imitations of the ancient Classics, that he seems to have had a much greater Confidence in the Fertility and Richness of his own Imagination than even Fletcher himself: The latter in his Masterpiece, The Faithful Shepherdess, frequently imitates Theocritus and Virgil; in Rollo has taken whole Scenes from Seneca, and almost whole Acts from Lucan in The False One. I do not blame him for this, his Imitations have not the Stifness which sometimes appears (tho’ not often) in Jonson, but breathe the free and full Air of Originals; and accordingly Rollo and The False One are two of Fletcher’s First-rate Plays. But Beaumont, I believe, never condescended to translate and rarely to imitate; However largely he was supplied with Classic Streams, from his own Urn all flows pure and untinctured. Here the two Friends

434 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

change Places: Beaumont rises in Merit towards Shakespear, and Fletcher descends towards Jonson. (i, x–xii) ⋆⋆⋆ As I have mentioned Jonson being in Poetic Energy about the same Distance below our Authors, as Shakespear is above them. I shall quote three Passages which seem to me in this very Scale. Jonson translates verbatim from Salust great part of Catiline’s Speech to his Soldiers, but adds in the Close: Methinks, I see Death and the Furies waiting What we will do; and all the Heaven at leasure For the great Spectacle. Draw then your Swords: And if our Destiny envy our Virtue The Honour of the Day, yet let us care To sell ourselves at such a Price, as may Undo the World to buy us; and make Fate While she tempts ours to fear her own Estate. Catiline, Act V. [412–19] Jonson has here added greatly to the Ferocity, Terror and Despair of Catiline’s Speech, but it is consonant to his Character both in his Life and Death. The Image in the three first Lines is extremely noble, and may be said to emulate tho’ not quite to reach the poetic Exstacy of the following Passage in Bonduca. Suetonius the Roman General having his small Army hem’d round by Multitudes, tells his Soldiers that the Number of the Foes, Is but to stick more Honour on your Actions, Load you with virtuous Names, and to your Memories Tie never-dying Time and Fortune constant. Go on in full Assurance, draw your Swords As daring and as confident as Justice. The Gods of Rome fight for ye; loud Fame calls ye Pitch’d on the topless Apennine, and blows To all the under World, all Nations, Seas, And unfrequented Desarts where the Snow Dwells; Wakens the ruin’d Monuments, and there Informs again the dead Bones with your Virtues. [3.2.62–73] The first four Lines are extremely nervous, but the Image which appears to excel the noble one of Jonson above, is Fame pitch’d on Mount Apennine (whose Top is supposed viewless from its stupendous Height) and from thence sounding their Virtues so loud that the dead awake and are re-animated to hear them. The close of the Sentiment is extremely in the Spirit of Shakespear and Milton…. (i, xx–xxii) NOTES 1 ‘Mouth uttering great sounds’: adapting Horace, Satires, 1.4.43–4. 2 ‘Animated force of mind’: Lucretius, De rerum natura, 1.72.

135. William Guthrie, Jonson and human nature 1750

From the unsigned A Dissertation on Comedy (1750). This is normally attributed to John Hippisley (d. 1767), but it is quoted and attributed to Guthrie in W.R.Chetwood’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Ben Jonson, Esq; (Dublin 1756), p. ix; and the writer of the Dissertation refers to ‘my Essay on Tragedy’ on p. 5 (cp. No. 127, above, which see also for details of Guthrie’s biography). The present work offers a defence of the stage against imputations of immorality and aims to show that the ancient drama could indeed be improved upon. Its views are clearly in the tradition of Dryden’s Essay (No. 67, above). [Guthrie has argued that when the occasion is great, Shakespeare always rises far above other poets.] Ben Johnson, of whom I am next to speak, is another shining Instance of our Superiority over the Ancients, in the Point now in Dispute: He had a thorough Knowledge of human Nature, from its highest to its lowest Gradations, was perfectly well acquainted with the various Combinations of Passions, and the innumerable Blendings of Vice and Virtue, which distinguish one Character from another: But what more eminently exalted him above all comic Writers whatever, was the Art (of all others the most difficult, though not equally glaring to the vulgar Eye with those of an inferior Rank) which he possess’d in the most eminent Degree, of happily marking the different Shades of the same Colour, of distinguishing the Covetous from the Covetous, the Voluptuous from the Voluptuous, &c. As a further Confirmation of this Truth, I shall take the Liberty of quoting Part of a Poem of the inimitable Waller, to our Author; which though the highest Panegyric that Language affords, is strictly and precisely true. [Quotes ll. 1–16 of Waller’s elegy, No. 49(f), above.] And as he was deeply read in Men, so was he in Books, being without Dispute the most learned of all his Cotemporaries: Of which his Cataline and Sejanus amount to a Proof, there being scarce a Passage in any Author, anticnt or modern, who ever touch’d on those Subjects, which he has not translated and interwoven with the Bodies of those Pieces.

436 BEN JONSON

In a Word, Shakespear is the Homer, Ben Johnson the Virgil of the British Nation: The one excelled in Genius, the other in Judgment; the first excites our Admiration, the last demands our Approbation: The one fires us in an Instant, the other warms us by Degrees. The former is irregularly charming, the latter regularly delightful. (38–40) ⋆⋆⋆ [The first requirement for comedy is a diversity of characters, copied from nature and artfully arranged.] Nor is it sufficient that the Characters are strongly marked and regularly disposed, they must also have a proper Business, an interested Concernment of their own in View, to the promoting of which their utmost Efforts are to be directed, but which must nevertheless collaterally conduce to the Completion of the main Action or Welfare of the whole; as the planetary Bodies turn on their own axis, and perform their Circle round the Sun at the same Time. Of this the Silent Woman (the correctest Play on the British Stage) is a remarkable Instance, and to which I refer the Reader, as to a perfect Standard of dramatic Writing. (53–4)

136. Garrick’s Every Man in his Humour revival 1751

(a) Prologue, by William Whitehead. Text from The London Magazine (December 1751), xx.

Whitehead (1715–85) became poet laureate in 1757. The first performance was on 29 November 1751, and the prologue was spoken by Garrick. It was revived with the play at Covent Garden in 1800. In a later poem, A Charge to the Poets (1762) Whitehead accused the contemporary audience of admiring Garrick rather than the authors he revived: without Garrick ‘A crude unmeaning mass had Johnson been, / And a dead letter Shakespear’s noblest scene’ (p. 15). See Introduction, p. 25. Criticks! your favour is our author’s right— The well known scenes, we shall present to-night, Are no weak efforts of a modern pen, But the strong touches of immortal Ben; A rough old bard, whose honest pride disdain’d Applause itself, unless by merit gain’d— And wou’d to-night your loudest praise disclaim, Shou’d his great shade perceive the doubtful fame, Not to his labours granted, but his name. Boldly he wrote, and boldly told the age, ‘He dar’d not prostitute the useful stage, Or purchase their delight at such a rate, As, for it, he himself must justly hate: But rather begg’d they wou’d be pleas’d to see From him, such plays, as other plays shou’d be: Wou’d learn from him to scorn a motley scene, And leave their monsters, to be pleas’d with men.’ Thus spoke the bard—And tho’ the times are chang’d, Since his free Muse, for fools the city rang’d; And satire had not then appear’d in state, To lash the finer follies of the great; Yet let not prejudice infect your mind, Nor slight the gold, because not quite refin’d; With no false niceness this performance view,

438 BEN JONSON

Nor damn for low, whate’er is just and true: Sure to those scenes some honour shou’d be paid, Which Camden patroniz’d, and Shakespear play’d: Nature was nature then, and still survives; The garb may alter, but the substance lives, Lives in this play—where each may find complete, His pictur’d self—Then favour the deceit— Kindly forget the hundred years between; Become old Britons, and admire old Ben. (xx, 568) (b) From Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, Esq. (1801), 2 vols.

Murphy (1727–1805) was an actor and playwright as well as an essayist. September 1751, to June 1752 Garrick had such resources in himself, that the failure or cold reception of a new piece was never prejudicial to his interest. He performed his best parts in tragedy and comedy, and was always sure of attracting crowded audiences. But still, amidst all the hurry and bustle of his business, he found leisure to search for novelty in the rich stores of ancient wit. Zealous at all times for the honour of the English drama, he turned his thoughts to Ben Jonson. Having by his performance of Abel Drugger, made the Alchymist a favourite play, he chose to bring forward the comedy of Every Man in his Humour. Having carefully retouched the play in several passages, he added an entire scene in the fourth act between himself and Dame Kitely. To disguise his suspicions, he assumed an air of gaiety, but under that mask the corrosions of jealousy were seen in every feature. Such was the expression of that various face, that the mixed emotions of his heart were strongly marked by his looks and the tone of his voice. Every Man in his Humour may be considered as one of Ben Jonson’s best productions. The poet does not look for a romantic story, for improbable incidents, and marvellous fictions, such as have of late taken possession of the stage. He had his eye on human life, and thence collected his various characters. Each of them is distinguished by a peculiar oddity. They all move in by-walks, or underplots, but tend to one central point, and contribute to the solution of the main business. Ben Jonson, like a skillful chess-player, to use Dryden’s comparison, by slow degrees draws up his men, and makes his pawns subservient to his greater persons. Kitely’s jealousy is inflamed by a set of rakes, who are pursuing their own pleasures, without any design to disturb his peace of mind. Wellbred, Dame Kitely’s brother, embroils her and her husband by his account of Cobb’s house; and thus, at the end of the fourth act, the business is wound up to a crisis, but how it is to end, cannot be foreseen. The several persons, having separate grounds of complaint, apply to a magistrate. They all meet before Justice Clement. Dame Kitely tells him, that Cobb’s house is a place of ill fame; and that she went thither in quest of her husband. ‘Did you find him there?’ says the Justice. In that instant Kitely interposes, saying, in a sharp eager tone, ‘I found her there’. [5.1.26–8] He who remembers how Garrick uttered those words, slapping his hand on the table, as if he made an important discovery, must acknowledge, trifling as it may now be thought, that it was a genuine stroke of nature. Bobadil charges Downright with an assault, but the Justice is of opinion that the soldier, who tamely received a blow, met with his deserts. All mistakes between the parties are cleared up, and Kitely is cured of his jealousy.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 439

It must be added, that a comedy, so completely acted, was hardly ever seen on the English stage. Garrick, Woodward in Bobadil, Yates, and Shuter, and indeed all the performers were so correct and natural, that the play drew crowded audiences, and kept possession of the stage during the manager’s life, (i, 205–8)

440

137. Francis Gentleman, Sejanus 1751

From the preface to Sejanus, A Tragedy. As it was intended for the Stage. With a Preface, Wherein the Manager’s Reasons for refusing it are set forth (1752). The preface is dated December 1751. Gentleman (1728–84) began his career in the army and then worked as actor and playwright and critic. His Sejanus is a drastic abridgement of Jonson’s play, giving prominence to Sejanus’s seduction and abandonment of Livia, her recriminations and death and giving him guilt-ridden soliloquies at the beginnings of Acts IV and V. See Introduction, p. 26. As noted in the title, Garrick turned it down, but Baker had heard that ‘it was acted at Bath with some Degree of Applause’ (The Companion to the Playhouse (1764), i, under ‘Sejanus. Trag. by Francis Gentleman’). It was revised again and reprinted in 1770 as The Favourite. It were an Imposition on the Town, and an Injustice to the Memory of the inimitable BEN JOHNSON; should I publish this Play, without acknowledging that most part of the Plot, some of the Scenes, and many of the Speeches, are almost literally copied from a dramatic Work of his, with the same Title. An Attempt at altering a Piece of his, is, I believe, unprecedented, and indeed bold, for one who never before, either burthen’d the Press with his Labours, or dar’d the Critic’s Censure. I was allur’d to the Task, by a Number of very noble Sentiments, which are scattered through the Original in many Lines, neither harsh or unmusical; wherein there seems to breath the true inspir’d Spirit of Poetry; and fancy plays within her proper Sphere, under the Restraint of a well temper’d critical Judgment; but much more by the strong Contrast of virtuous and vicious Characters, with which I found it adorn’d; which is the most useful, laudable, and consequently the fundamental Part of the DRAMA. To reduce the Multiplicity of Characters, the Train of Incidents, to make the Parts of LIVIA, and AGRIPPINA, somewhat interesting, which in JOHNSON are very near despicable; to select his Beauties, and by proper Means to bring about the Catastrophe; seem’d, at first, an Enterprize as difficult, as toiling for Wealth in a Mine; and almost startled me from my Design; But however, as I had begun, I determined to proceed; and of my Success, the Perusal of the Piece will make you a Judge. JOHNSON’s strict Adherence to History, in his two Plays of SEJANUS and Catiline, would have been highly commendable, had it not been manifestly prejudicial to him; since he has been so scholastically nice, as scarcely to omit a single Person or Incident, mention’d in the Lives of these great wicked Men; nay he has even translated literally, in his SEJANUS, several Lines from CORNELIUS TACITUS: By this Means his Tragedies became rather dramatic Histories, than Entertainments suited to a modern Theatre. From this I have ventur’d to deviate; I have kept

442 BEN JONSON

CÆSAR at ROME, to preside at the Conviction of SEJANUS; as I think it adds much Spirit, to the closing the Catastrophe; I have drawn him of a Disposition much milder than he was in Reality. The pious Resolution of repealing the Oppressions, and healing the constitutional Wounds made by SEJANUS, which I have put into his Mouth, in the last Speech of the Play, I thought necessary to preserve Poetical Justice; to which I think History should give Way; for the real Use of dramatic Performances is, to instil Virtue, and raise an Abhorrence of Vice. Example is a strong Argument; nothing conduces so much to our Reformation, as punishing the Wicked and rewarding the Virtuous, ’tis then that the Moral is truly strong, indeed the Guiltless must sometimes fall, to heighten the Distress, and impress us with a just Pity. (v–vii)

138. Bonnell Thornton, review of Epicoene 1752

From The Spring-Garden Journal, no. 1, November 1752, signed ‘Miss Priscilla Termagant’. Garrick’s carefully cast revival took place at Drury Lane on 26 October 1752. The review is presumably by Bonnell Thornton (1724–68), who edited the Journal. He had a reputation as a wit and was involved in a number of journalistic ventures, of which The Connoisseur (1754–6), written with George Colman, was the most successful. I was induced the other Night, through a Curiosity natural to my Sex, to see the Silent Woman: The Thought of beholding a Miracle, A Silent Woman! had raised my Expectations to the utmost Pitch; but I was very soon undeceived. The principal Design of the Play strikes at a certain Society of Ladies, who assembled together (in Ben’s Time), and went by the Name of Collegiates. The Intent of their Meeting was to have as little Communication with their Husbands as possible, having a more general Passion for Mankind: They were not strictly pious, nor critically modest, but entertained Gallants, Wits, &c. who most probably were no more than what we now call pretty Fellows; and their Sports and Pastimes were a Sort of Routs or Drums; they had Laws which were held sacred, and the Violation of them attended with severe Penalties; Haughty, Centaur, and Mavis, were the Principals of this Society. Morose is an elderly Man, has got a large Estate, and is the most capricious Person living; the ringing of a Bell, or the creaking of a new Shoe, distracts him; but the Noise of a Woman’s Tongue, and the Rattling of a Coach, are two intolerable Evils. I am inclined to think this Humourist shews some Degree of Rationality in these two Articles; for, were our modern Ladies less noisy, and the Coaches less frequent, more Families might enjoy Peace and Tranquility, and an Affluence of Fortune…. [Gives an outline of the rest of the play.] ⋆⋆⋆ There are many diverting Incidents, and various odd Characters inimitably ridiculed. Sir John Daw is a noisy, vain Writer of Madrigals, and a chattering Coxcomb: Sir Amourousla-Foole is his Intimate, and a Fop, full of his Family, delights in feasting the Men, and making Presents to the Ladies; and Captain Otter is a clamorous drunken Fool.

444 BEN JONSON

The Character of Morose is the most extraordinary one that ever appeared upon a Stage; and I am apt to imagine, had a modern Author drawn so unnatural a Part, that the Audience would have shewn very little Complaisance to his Humour. I will take upon me to say, this Character never existed but in Imagination; and I am at a Loss to find out Mr. Garrick’s Inducement in reviving this Play; for as it is temporary, a very few of the Audience could possibly relish the Wit; and the Scene between the Doctor and Mr. Parson is improper to be represented before a polite Audience, and tho’ Every Man in his Humour met with so general an Approbation, yet it could not insure Success to this Play. I will not pretend to say, Mr. Garrick regarded only the filling his House; I would rather impute it, for once, to his Want of Judgment: However, he has given two ingenious young Fellows an Opportunity of shewing themselves to Advantage, I mean Mr. Shuter and Mr. Palmer, who have each of them more Merit than Encouragement. (12–15).

139. Theophilus Cibber and Robert Shiells, summary criticism of Jonson 1753

From The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753), largely compiled by Shiells, and revised by Cibber. Cibber (1703–58) had often appeared in Jonson revivals in a long career on stage and can reasonably be assigned the paragraph in the extract below on the fortunes of the three most popular Jonson plays in the repertory. In his Dissertations on Theatrical Subjects (1756) Cibber commends Garrick’s performance of Kitely as ‘so excellent a Piece of Nature—so truely Comic, —it makes Amends for all the Farce with which that indelicate Piece of low Humour abounds’ (1759 edn, p. 47). Robert Shiells (d. 1753), a Scot, was at one time an amanuensis to Dr Johnson. The first part of the ‘Life’ includes extracts from Drummond’s Conversations with Jonson (see Introduction, p. 30) and quotes remarks on Jonson from Pope, Dryden, and others. Ben had certainly no great talent for versification, nor does he seem to have had an extraordinary ear; his verses are often wanting in syllables, and sometimes have too many. I shall quote some lines of his poem to the memory of Shakespear, before I give a detail of his pieces. [Quotes ll. 1–30 of Jonson’s ‘Ode’ to Shakespeare.] He then goes on to challenge all antiquity to match Shakespear; but the poetry is so miserable, that the reader will think the above quotation long enough. (242–3) ⋆⋆⋆ [From the summary accounts of individual works.] Cataline’s conspiracy, a tragedy, first acted in the year 1611. In this our author has translated a great part of Salust’s history; and it is when speaking of this play, that Dryden says, he did not borrow but commit depredations upon the ancients. Tragedy was not this author’s talent; he was totally without tenderness, and was so far unqualified for tragedy. (244–5) ⋆⋆⋆

446 BEN JONSON

[Quotes from Alexander Gill’s poem on the failure of The Magnetic Lady, No. 41, above.] These lines are without wit, and without poetry; they contain a mean reflexion on Ben’s original employment, of which he had no occasion to be ashamed; but he was paid in kind, and Ben answers him with equal virulence, and in truth it cannot be said with more wit or poetry, for it is difficult to determine which author’s verses are most wretched. (246) [Quotes U.V., 39, ‘An Answer to Alexander Gill’.] ⋆⋆⋆ [Note at the end of the account.] The Alchymist, the Fox, and the Silent Woman have been oftner acted than all the rest of Ben Johnson’s plays put together; they have ever been generally deemed good stock plays, and been performed to many crowded audiences, in several separate seasons, with universal applause. Why the Silent Woman met not with success, when revived last year at Drury Lane Theatre, let the new critics, or the actors of the New Mode, determine. Thus have we given a detail of Ben Johnson’s works. He is allowed to have been a scholar, and to have understood and practised the dramatic rules; but Dryden proves him to have likewise been an unbounded plagiary. Humour was his talent; and he had a happy turn for an epitaph; we cannot better conclude his character as a poet, than in the nervous lines of the Prologue quoted in the Life of Shakespear. (248–9) [Quotes Johnson’s lines on Jonson from the 1747 ‘Prologue’, No. 129, above.]

140. Richard Hurd, Every Man out of his Humour, The Alchemist, Volpone 1753–7

(a) From ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Provinces of the several Species of the Drama’, added to the second edition of Hurd’s annotated Ars Poetica, Q.Horatii Flacci Epistolae ad Pisones, et Augustum: With an English commentary and Notes (1753), 2 vols. In portraits of characters, as we may call those that give a picture of the manners, the artist, if he be of real ability, will not go to work on the possibility of an abstract idea. All he intends, is to shew that some one quality predominates: and this he images strongly and by such signatures as are most conspicuous in the operation of the leading passion. And when he hath done this, we may, in common speech or in compliment, if we please, to his art, say of such a portrait that it images to us not the man but the passion; just as the antients observed of the famous statue of Apollodorus by Silarion, that it expressed not the angry Apollodorus, but his passion of anger⋆. But by this must be understood only that he has well expressed the leading parts of the designed character. For the rest he treats his subject as he would any other; that is, he represents the concomitant affections, or considers merely that general symmetry and proportion which are expected in a human figure. And this is to copy nature which affords no specimen of a man turned all into a single passion. No metamorphosis could be more strange or incredible. Yet portraits of this vicious taste are the admiration of common starers, who, if they find a picture of a miser for instance (as there is no commoner subject of moral portraits) in a collection, where any muscle is strained and feature hardened into the expression of this idea, never fail to profess their wonder and approbation of it. —On this idea of excellence, Reubens’ book of the PASSIONS must be said to contain a set of the justest moral portraits: And the CHARACTERS of Theophrastus might be recommended, in a dramatic view, as preferable to those to Terence. The virtuosi in the fine arts would certainly laugh at the former of those judgments. But the latter, I suspect, will not be thought so extraordinary. At least if one may guess from the practice of some of our best comic writers, and the success which such plays have commonly met with. It were easy to instance in almost all plays of character. But if the reader would see the extravagance of building dramatic manners on abstract ideas, in its full light, he needs only turn to B.Johnson’s Every man out of his humour; which under the name of a play of character is in fact, an unnatural, and, as the painters call it, hard delineation of a group of simply existing passions, wholly chimerical, and unlike to any thing we observe in the commerce of real life. Yet this comedy has always had its admirers. And

448 BEN JONSON

Randolph in particular, was so taken with the design, that he seems to have formed his muse’s looking glass in express imitation of it. Shakespeare, we may observe, is in this as in all the other more essential beauties of the drama, a perfect model. If the discerning reader peruse attentively his comedies with this view he will find his best-marked characters discoursing thro’ a great deal of their parts, just like any other, and only expressing their essential and leading qualities occasionally, and as circumstances concur to give an easy exposition to them. This singular excellence of his comedy, was the effect of his copying faithfully after nature, and of the force and vivacity of his genius which made him attentive to what the progress of the scene successively presented to him…. (i, 238–40) ⋆⋆⋆ …the perfection of comedy lying in the accuracy and fidelity of universal representation, and farce professedly neglecting or rather wantonly transgressing the limits of common nature and just decorum, they clash entirely with each other. And comedy must so far fail of giving the pleasure, appropriate to its design, as it allies it self with farce; while farce, on the other hand, forfeits the use, it intends, of promoting popular ridicule, by restraining itself within the cautious rules of decency, which comedy exacts. But there is little occasion to guard against this latter abuse. The danger is all on the the other side. And the passion for farce, has, in fact, possessed the modern poets to such a degree that we have scarcely one example of a comedy, without this impure mixture. If any are to be excepted from this censure in Moliere, they are his Misanthrope and Tartuffe, which are accordingly, by common allowance, the best of his large collection. In proportion as his other plays have less or more of this farcical turn, their true value hath been long since determined. Of our own comedies, such of them, I mean, as are worthy of criticism, Ben Johnson’s Alchymist and Volpone, bid the fairest for being written in this genuine unmixed manner. Yet, tho’ their merits are very great, the impartial critic will hardly allow them this perfection. The ALCHYMIST is, I think, throughout exaggerated, and, at best, belongs to that species of comedy, which we have before called particular and partial. The extravagant pursuit so strongly exposed in that play, hath been now, of a long time forgotten, and we therefore find it difficult to enter fully into the humour of this highly wrought character. We may remark, in general, of such subjects, that they are a strong temptation to the writer to exceed the bounds of truth and mediocrity in his draught of them at first, and are further liable to an imperfect, and even unfair sentence from the reader afterwards. For the welcome reception, which these pictures of prevailing local folly meet with on the stage, cannot but induce the poet, almost without design, to inflame the representation: And the want of archetypes, in a little time, makes it pass for immoderate, were it originally given with ever so much discretion and justice. The plan of the Alchymist is then essentially such as subjects this comedy to the imputations of farce. The VOLPONE, on the other hand, is a subject fitted for the entertainment of all times, and is therefore of the sort a great writer would chuse, when he wanted to transmit a monument of his art and genius to posterity. Such appears to have been the generous purpose of the poet in this admirable comedy, and the fate of it has been answerable to his intention; yet neither, I am afraid, is this a complete model. There are even some Incidents of a farcical invention; particularly the Mountebank Scene and Sir Politique’s tortoise are in the taste of the old comedy. Besides, the humour of the dialogue is sometimes on the point of becoming inordinate, as may be seen in the pleasantry of Corbaccio’s mistakes through deafness, and in other instances. The cast of his plays indeed

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 449

could hardly be any other, if we attend to the character of the writer. For his nature was severe and rigid, and this in giving a strength and manliness, gave at times too, an intemperance to his satyr. His taste for ridicule was strong but indelicate, which made him not over curious in the choice of his topics. And lastly his style in picturing characters, tho’ masterly, was without that elegance of hand, which is required to correct and allay the force of so bold a colouring. Thus, the biass of his nature leading him to Plautus rather than Terence for his model, it is not to be wondered that his wit is too frequently caustic; his raillery coarse; and his humour excessive. Some later writers for the stage have, no doubt, avoided these defects of the exactest of our old dramatists. But do they rival his excellencies? Posterity, I am afraid, will judge otherwise, whatever may be now thought of some more fashionable comedies. And if they do not, neither the state of general manners, nor the turn of the public taste appears to be such as countenances the expectation of greater improvements. To those, who are not over sanguine in their hopes, our forefathers will perhaps be thought to have furnished (what, in nature, seem linked together) the fairest example of dramatic, as of real manners. (i, 276–9) (b) From the revised version of Hurd’s ‘Dissertation’ on drama, in the 1757 (third) edition of his Horace. Hurd finds The Alchemist to be a true comedy after all, but moderates his enthusiasm for Volpone slightly. Of our own comedies, of them, I mean, as are worthy of criticism, Ben. Johnson’s Alchymist and Volpone, bid the fairest for being written in this genuine unmixed manner. Yet, tho’ their merits are very great, severe Criticism might find something to object even to these. The ALCHYMIST, some will think, is exaggerated through out, and so, at best, belongs to that species of comedy, which we have before called particular and partial. At least, the extravagant pursuit so strongly exposed in that play, hath now, of a long time been forgotten; so that we find it difficult to enter fully into the humour of this highly wrought character. And, in general, we may remark of such characters, that they are a strong temptation to the writer to exceed the bounds of truth in his draught of them at first, and are further liable to an imperfect, and even unfair sentence from the reader afterwards. For the welcome reception, which these pictures of prevailing local folly meet with on the stage, cannot but induce the poet, almost without design, to inflame the representation: And the want of archetypes, in a little time, makes it pass for immoderate, were it originally given with ever so much discretion and justice. So that whether the Alchymist be farcical or not, it will appear, at least, to have this note of Farce, ‘That the principal character is exaggerated.’ But then this is all we must affirm. For as to the subject of this Play’s being a local folly, which seems to bring it directly under the denomination of Farce, it is but just to make a distinction. Had the end and purpose of the Play been to expose Alchymy, it had been liable to this objection. But this mode of local folly, is employed as the means, only of exposing another folly, extensive as our Nature and coeval with it, namely Avarice. So that the subject has all the requisites of true Comedy. It is just otherwise, we may observe, in the Devil’s an Ass; which therefore properly falls under our censure. For there, the folly of the time, Projects and Monopolies, are brought in to be exposed, as the end and purpose of the comedy. On the whole, The Alchymist is a Comedy in just form, but a little Farcical in the extension of one of it’s characters.

450 BEN JONSON

The VOLPONE, is a subject so manifestly fitted for the entertainment of all times, that it stands in need of no vindication. Yet neither, I am afraid, is this Comedy, in all respects, a complete model. There are even some Incidents of a farcical invention; particularly the Mountebank Scene and Sir Politique’s Tortoise are in the taste of the old comedy; and without it’s rational purpose. Besides, the humour of the dialogue is sometimes on the point of becoming inordinate, as may be seen in the pleasantry of Corbaccio’s mistakes through deafness, and in other instances. And we shall not wonder that the best of his plays are liable to some objections of this sort, if we attend to the character of the writer. (i, 304–6) NOTE • Non hominem ex œre fecit, sed iracundiam. (Plin. 348) [‘It represented in bronze not a human being but anger personified’: Pliny, Natural History, 34.19.82].

141. Arthur Murphy, essays in The Gray’s Inn Journal 1754–86

Murphy published two series of The Gray’s Inn Journal, fifty-two numbers in 1752–3 and another fifty-two in 1753–4. They were then issued in a two-volume edition in 1756 and in altered form as volumes v and vi of Murphy’s seven-volume Works (1786), from which this text is taken. For Murphy, see No. 136(b), above. (a) From no. 90, 6 July 1754 (it appears as no. 49 in the original edition, and as no. 96 in the 1756 edition, with two different dates). In the last part of the extract, Murphy develops a contrast between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson sketched in an essay which disappears in the 1786 edition, numbered no. 38 (dated 7 July 1753) in the 1756 edition. Murphy there distinguishes between the ‘Humourist’ and the ‘Man of Humour’, the latter being the observer of the foibles of the former. Falstaff is a Man of Humour as well as a Humourist, whereas Jonson’s characters, Murphy says, ‘are always disagreeably odd; their whims are so extravagant, that they sometimes deserve rather the Name of Madmen, and there is hardly any Thing in any of them, that would induce a Gentleman to spend an Evening with them’ (i, 243–4). [Murphy has quoted Akenside’s notion of the ridiculous as ‘Some motley dissonance of things combin’d,’ from The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), Book iii, ll. 251–7.] The ingenious author pursues his subject through a variety of illustrations. We see in each of them, that the ridiculous always arises from repugnant qualities, ill-paired and blended together. He tells us, in the note, that ‘the sensation of ridicule is not a bare perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas, but a passion or emotion of the mind consequential to that perception.’ The emotions here intended are laughter and contempt, and these it is the business of comedy to excite. To perform this in all objects which come before the comic muse, in men and manners, in all actions and passions, requires a very delicate hand. Prior has expressed this with his usual elegance. And tho’ the error may be such As Knaggs and Burgess cannot hit, It yet may feel the nicer touch Of Wycherly or Congreve’s wit.1

452 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

In producing portraits of mankind, it is not enough to display foibles and oddities; a fine vein of ridicule must run through the whole, to urge the mind to frequent emotions of laughter; otherwise there will be danger of exhibiting disagreeable characters, without affording the proper entertainment. Ben Johnson is apt to err in this point: Morose is a surly, ill-natured, absurd humorist, whom we can hardly laugh at: he soon becomes bad company. Many of Johnson’s characters are of the same cast; while in Shakespear’s Falstaff, the ridiculous ideas are placed in such an artful point of view, that our merriment can never be restrained, whenever Sir John appears, (vi, 192–3) (b) From no. 91, 13 July 1754. This essay appears for the first time in the 1786 edition.

He, who should take for the groundwork of his piece, a set of characters, in themselvs absurd, and under the dominion of some predominant humour, without one person among them of sober manners, and a just way of thinking, would not, in my opinion, furnish an agreeable entertainment. The attempt has been made by some of our old poets; but, I believe, their success has not encouraged many of their successors to tread in their steps. For this there seem to be two well-grounded reasons: in the first place, a collection of mere humorists, without an intermixture of others, governed by the ordinary rules of common sense and common honesty, seldom occurs in the usual course of life. Secondly, the charm of contrast would be altogether lost. The piece would want those lights and shades, which are perceived in every company, and every club. Ben Johnson’s Every Man out of his Humour may serve as a proof of what is here advanced. Old Ben was a sharp and severe observer of the manners. The peculiar bent of his genius, as Dennis observes in a letter to Congreve, inclined him to draw deformity, rather than beauty, (vi, 197–8) [Murphy goes on to quote from the letter, which is in No. 96 (b), above, and to discuss the history of humours comedy, paraphrasing Jonson’s explanation of the humours from Every Man out of his Humour and noting that his verses ‘have much of the rust of antiquity, and, indeed, of that uncouth phraseology, which often disfigures the style of that, otherwise, valuable author’ (vi, 199).] NOTE 1 Prior, ‘Paulo Purganti and His Wife: An Honest, but a Simple Pair’, ll. 27–30.

142. David Hume, Jonson’s rude art 1754

From The History of Great Britain. Vol. I. (Edinburgh 1754). Hume (1711–76), Scottish philosopher and historian, included discussions of developments in literature and science in his exceptionally popular History, completed in six volumes in 1762. The section on ‘Learning and arts’ under James I in the present volume (reprinted as volume v of the complete edition) vigorously condemns the ‘very bad taste’ prevailing in the period, a taste which gave rise to ‘forced turns and sentiments’ and ‘distorted conceptions’ inspired by the ‘Asiatic manner’ of Roman authors (pp. 136–7). Shakespeare’s work illustrates for Hume the dangers of relying on genius alone in the arts: ‘there may even remain a suspicion, that we over-rate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic, on account of their being disproportioned and mishapen’ (pp. 137–8). JOHNSON possessed all the learning, which was wanting to Shakespeare, and wanted all the genius, of which the other was possessed. Both of them were equally deficient in taste and elegance, in harmony and correctness. A servile copist of the antients, Johnson translated into bad English, the beautiful passages of the Greek and Roman authors, without accommodating them to the manners of his age and country. His merit has been totally eclipsed by that of Shakespeare, whose rude genius prevailed over the rude art of his cotemporary. The English theatre has ever since taken a strong tincture of Shakespeare’s spirit and character; and thence it has proceeded, that the nation have undergone, from all their neighbors, the reproach of barbarism, from which their many valuable productions in other parts of learning, would otherways have exempted them. Johnson had a pension of a hundred merks from the King which Charles afterwards augmented to a hundred pounds. He died in 1637, aged 63. (138)

454

143. Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier, Jonson’s envy of Shakespeare 1754

From The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754). This three-volume allegory is in the form of a dialogue between the heroine Portia and The Cry, an assembly of voices who represent ‘Error and all her numerous Train’. There are frequent Shakespearean quotations as well as debts to The Faerie Queene. For Sarah Fielding, see No. 126, above. Jane Collier was a lifelong friend of the Fieldings, and the author of An Essay on the Art of Tormenting (1753). The exact degrees of envy and insult, practised amongst these little children towards each other, are generally to be discovered in some infants of so large a growth, that their bodies are visibly arrived at maturity, whilst their minds have carefully preserved every part of childishness, but its innocence. Mr. Pope, in his preface to Shakespear’s works, declares it as his opinion, that Ben Johnson’s envy first gave rise to the report of Shakespear’s want of learning, which report hath prevailed even to this day.1 The surly laureat (as Theobald, in one of his notes, judiciously calls Johnson)2 hath left behind him a very good receipt, which gloomy malice may ever make use of, to pull down a bright contemporary genius. In the first place, Johnson exalted learning to a pitch beyond its value; then by making the most glaring shew of his own learning, he endeavoured to fix the highest admiration on himself; casting at the same time an imputation on Shakespear, for want of learning, and spared no pains in exhibiting what he thought so much his own superiority in that single point. Whoever will take the trouble of extracting from Johnson’s prologue to every man in his humour, and from various other parts of his writings, the side-way reflexions which he frequently casts on Shakespear, need not I think seek farther for the strongest proofs of his malevolence and impudence of heart. I would not use such words, if softer terms could convey my meaning; but I cannot from complaisance, lose the use of language, and drop half the image I design to give. Shakespear saw a rising genius in Johnson, and like himself, that is, like one who knew the true value of human learning, and its utmost boundaries, and whose genius was exalted by candor and good-nature, prevailed on the managers of the theatre to encourage Johnson, and to exhibit his first performance on the stage. After Shakespear had nourish’d in his breast this young and venomous snake, now grown to maturity, and warm’d by his friendly bosom, Ben Johnson, like himself, that is, like one who possess’d so much of genius as to make him grasp at the fame of having all, spurn’d at his generous benefactor, caught the ears of the multitude by sharp expressions against him, which he call’d humour, and I call spite, and endeavoured to throw all the obstacles he could invent in the

456 BEN JONSON

way of Shakespear’s race to the goal of fame. But Shakespear could never be provoked to return such paltry spite; he, like the strong mastiff, steadily pass’d by the whiffling cur, unheeding of his yelpings. I know the men (as Montaigne says of Plutarch, and some other writers) to their inmost souls; I know them by their works. Shakespear indeed had no cause to disguise himself; and Johnson’s malice was too obstreperous for his management; he could not restrain it from breaking out, where gratitude should have with-held it, and with the monument he hath left to posterity of his genius, he hath join’d to it a strong picture of his unconquerable envy. The Cry, not in the least observing what Portia had said of the character of the man, began to accuse her of a total want of humour, in not being pleased with such entertaining characters, as are drawn by Ben Johnson. Then some were sounding the praises of Bobadel, others of the jealous Kitely, and all joined in admiration of the diverting figure of master Stephen, when he saw his broken toledo. Portia. Very justly, O ye Cry, have you pointed out the humour of three very entertaining comic characters, which have lately gained such merited applause; nor is there any one amongst you, who can admire the beauties of some of Ben Johnson’s writings more than I do. For, besides the foregoing ones, which by the force of inimitable action have made such an impression on your memories, there is Morose, Macilente, lady Woud-be, and many other strong pictures of nature, in his comedies: and for his tragedies, the speeches are extremely fine, both in his Catiline, and his Sejanus: his just picture also of an inexorable mob, in their usage of Sejanus’s daughter, where the distress must move the hardest heart, are such proofs of genius as have often pleased my fancy, and claim’d my admiration. The Cry were now all agape, and as they were conscious that to give merited praise, without being blind to glaring faults, was not in themselves (notwithstanding, when it served their purpose, they were always ready loudly to clamour for impartiality) they could not imagine what Portia meant by bearing such testimony to Ben Johnson’s genius as a writer, since she had before condemn’d his malice. Portia. I should be ashamed of myself, if I would not acknowledge the merit of Ben Johnson as a writer; but a capacity for writing holds so very low a place in my esteem, when weigh’d in the balance with an honest heart, that with me (and I wish it was the same with every other human creature) it hath no chance of concealing one grain of malice or envy; had Ben Johnson known the insignificancy of genius in comparison with a benevolent heart, he had been contented with himself, had borne to have taken the second rank, had loved his friend Shakespear instead of abusing him, had therefore been a happier man whilst he lived, and left behind him postumous fame (if postumous fame could delight him) sufficient to have gratified the wishes of any reasonable man; and it might also have been untainted with that malice, which is now too visible to be concealed from observing eyes. Altho’ (as I before said) I would willingly acknowledge all Ben’s merit as a writer; yet would I wish to set his malignant envy in full view, that the face of such envy may be known whenever it dares to make its odious appearance; nor would I willingly have mankind bully’d into becoming the paltry instruments to gratify the spleen of malignant envy, by turning their eyes averse from one of the greatest glories of the human race. The Cry toss’d up their noses, and said that they should not condemn Ben Johnson, because Portia had pleased to abuse him; nor would they blindly admire Shakespear, because she thought proper to puff him off as something so very extraordinary: and then with the highest insult they sneeringly threw about the word PUFF, and wittily told her she would do well to enlist herself in that office to some modern author. A loud laugh of triumph re-

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 457

echo’d through the throng; and Portia unheeding of their rude behaviour thus pursued her subject. (i, 162–8) NOTES 1 See No. 114, above. 2 Theobald (ed.), The Works of Shakespeare (1733), vi, 162 (not printed in the selections in No. 120, above).

458

144. Peter Whalley’s edition of Jonson 1756

The Works of Ben Jonson (1756), edited by Whalley, provided the first eighteenthcentury critical edition of Jonson. Whalley hoped his edition would show that ‘a reader of Johnson’s plays, hath more to look for than is commonly imagined’, according to an article containing a sample of notes on Every Man in his Humour in The Gentleman’s Magazine (1752), xxii, 4, presumably by Whalley himself. A review in The Critical Review (1756), i, 462–72, suggested that Whalley had not done enough explication in the edition, given that Jonson was so imbued with the low life of the time that his work is ‘in a great measure unintelligible to the modern reader’. The selection of notes below is weighted towards the critical, rather than the exegetical. Whalley’s opinions on Jonson were quickly taken up: in the year after the edition had been published, the notes enthusing about ‘Queen and huntress chaste and fair’ from Cynthia’s Revels and about the expressiveness of a line from The Sad Shepherd appeared in Biographia Britannica (1757), iv, 1789n, 2790n. See Introduction, pp. 19–20. (a) From the preface. With respect to Johnson’s character as a writer, he is universally allowed to have been the most learned and judicious poet of his age. His learning indeed is to be seen in almost every thing he wrote; and sometimes perhaps it may appear, where we could wish it might not be seen, although he seldom transgresseth in this point; for a just decorum and preservation of character, with propriety of circumstance and of language, are his striking excellencies, and eminently distinguish his correctness and art. What he borroweth from the antients, he generally improves by the use and application, and by this means he improved himself, in contending to think, and to express his thoughts like them; and accordingly those plays are the best, in which we find most imitations or translations from classic authors; but he commonly borrows with the air of a conqueror, and adorns himself in their dress, as with the spoils and trophies of victory. To make a proper estimation of his merits, as a dramatic writer, we are to consider what was the state of the drama, and the usual practice of the stage-writers in those early times; and what alterations and improvements it received from the plays of Jonson. Shakespear, and Beaumont and Fletcher, are the only contemporary writers that can be put in competition with him; and as they have excellencies of genius superior to those of Jonson, they have weaknesses and defects which are proportionably greater. If they

460 BEN JONSON

transcend him in the creative powers, and the astonishing flights of imagination, their judgment is much inferior to his; and if he doth not at any time rise so high, neither perhaps doth he sink so low as they have done. We mean not to insinuate any thing to the discredit of Jonson’s genius, yet his fancy had, perhaps, exerted itself with greater energy and strength, had he been less a poet, or less acquainted with the antient models. Struck with the correctness and truth of composition in the old classics, and inflamed by passionate admiration to emulate their beauties, he was insensibly led to imagine, that equal honours were due to successful imitation, as to original and unborrowed thinking. Jonson was naturally turned to industry and reading; and as to treasure up knowledge must be the exercise and work of memory, by the assiduous employment of that faculty, he would necessarily be less disposed to exert the native inborn spirit of genius and invention; and as his memory was thus fraught with the stores of antient poetry, the sentiments impressed upon his mind, would easily intermix and assimilate with his own; and when transfused into the language of his country, would appear to have all the graces and the air of novelty. It is owing to these reasons, that Jonson became constrained in his imagination, and less original in his sentiments and thoughts; but from hence he obtained that severity of collected judgment, and that praise of art, which have given his authority the greatest weight in the decisions and the laws of criticism. Enlightened with these assistances, Jonson was enabled to see through, and effectually to surmount the prejudices of vulgar practice: and by a departure from the beaten track of unreasonable custom, he struck at once into the less frequented road of probability and nature. Let us proceed then to examine what was the reigning mode in the composition of our antient drama. In designing the plots of their several comedies, our old poets generally drew them from some romance, or novel: and from thence also they derived the different incidents of the various scenes; and the resemblance between the original and the copy, was every way exact. The same wildness and extravagance of fable prevailed in both: all the miracles and absurdities of story being faithfully transcribed into the play; and hence it is, that the scene of action is generally placed abroad; the principal characters are also foreign; or to speak more truly, they are Englishmen disguised with foreign names: for the manners of all the different persons are intirely English, as is more particularly observable in the inferior characters of the play. So that whether the scene may lie at Athens, at Venice, or Vienna, all the wit, and all the humour are of British growth, and are adapted to the taste and genius of the poet’s own age. When Jonson first applied himself to writing for the stage, he conformed in like manner to the general practice of his contemporary poets. A plain instance of this appears in his comedy called The Case is Altered; and this reason concurs with other evidences, to determine that piece to have been one of his earlier dramatic compositions. The scene is Milan, the principal personages are of the same place; and the sentiments they have occasion to use, are what nature in any climate, would express her thoughts in, upon a similar occasion. The droll and comic part of the drama shews itself in the manners of the servants, the mechanics, and lower characters of the comedy; and although these are exhibited to us under the sounding names of Sebastian, Balthasar, and Vincentio, their whole dialogue and humour are a lively copy from the homespun wit of the clowns and artisans of the poet’s native country. The same observations may be extended to the generality of Shakespear’s and Fletcher’s plays, where under exotic characters and story, the authors are continually glancing at domestic incidents, and comment on the times, skreened beneath the cover of antient or foreign fable. But Jonson was soon sensible, how inconsistent this medly of names and manners was in reason and nature; and with how little propriety it could ever have a place

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 461

in a legitimate and just picture of real life: and hence as he improved in critical learning, and became acquainted with the true principles and laws of dramatic writing, he reformed the extravagances which had universally prevailed in the times before him. His plays were real plays of five acts, in which the continuity of the scenes, and the unities of time and place were regularly observed. And the better to effect this, we must remark that he no longer borrowed his fable from a well-known, or pre-invented story, but formed his plot, and drew his characters from the stores of his imagination, and his observations upon men and manners. In consequence of this, his scene was generally laid at home; his characters and manners are equally domestic, and are uniform and congruous throughout the whole: and this was really adapting comedy to its proper end, in making it Vitæ speculum, & exemplar morum; a mirror to reflect the follies and vices of the age. That this reform was truly the result of conscious and reflecting art, we shall demonstrate to the reader by a singular instance, which confirms the account we have laid down above, and sets the judgment of Jonson in the fairest point of view. (i, iv–ix) [Whalley goes on to describe the revision of Every Man in his Humour to give it English characters and an English setting.] ⋆⋆⋆ But notwithstanding the art and care of Jonson to redress the incongruities taken notice of, a remarkable instance of Italian manners is still preserved, which in transferring the scene he forgot to change. It is an allusion to the custom of poisoning, of which we have instances of various kinds, in the dark and fatal revenges of Italian jealousy. (i, xi) [Cites the exchange between Kitely and Wellbred, 4.8.1–41.] ⋆⋆⋆ There are only two comedies of Jonson, where the scene is laid abroad, the Poetaster and the Fox. The former was purposely designed as a vindication of himself, and to expose the pretensions of his adversary Decker. This led him to make Rome his scene, and to choose the times of Augustus Cæsar, for the period of action. His intention in this as he hath declared in the apology annexed to the play, was to shew that Virgil and Horace, and every candidate for honest and fair fame, had their enemies and detractors, envious of them and of their writings; and by these examples it is insinuated to the reader, that the excellencies and merits of Jonson were the sole occasion of the calumnies thrown out against him; and that he, had only the fortune to be abused, in like manner as his betters had been before him. And here it must be said, that he is careful in the main, to observe the decorum of character, which his plan required; but as it naturally led him to allude to particular persons and incidents of his own times, we have occasional references to both these; disguised indeed under the cover of Roman forms, and affecting the stile and manners of the supposed times and persons of the play. In the design of Volpone, the poet had a more generous design in view; and by his admirable execution of that design, he hath left posterity a lasting monument of his genius and art. And here he was induced, for the sake of probability, and to give lively and strong colouring to his draught, to fix on Venice for the scene of his drama. By this choice he gained an opening for the introduction of a domestic character, which, placed upon a middle ground, gratified his favourite passion of displaying a particular folly of his age and nation; for as the scene was thus laid

462 BEN JONSON

abroad, he had the inviting opportunity in the character of sir Politic Would-be, to expose the reigning affectation of knowing men and manners; when the youth of the kingdom were sent, in quest of policy and knowledge, to poison their faith and morals, by the acquisition of Italian atheism and Italian deceit. In his design and exhibition of characters, Jonson was particularly happy in delineating those which are generally known by the name of characters of humour; a subject which he perfectly understood, and which he executed with equal felicity and perfection. But as humour is the excess of a particular passion, and appropriate only to a single character, it hath from hence been thought, that Jonson’s characters are only passions or affections personized, and not faithful copies from living manners. But to this we might reply, that far from being thought to build his characters upon abstract ideas, he was really accused of representing particular persons then existing; and that even those characters which appear to be the most exaggerated, are said to have had their respective archetypes in nature and life. It is further to be observed, that many of Jonson’s comedies are of that kind, which may be called particular and partial: the follies they were designed to censure were more immediately local; and as the pursuits which they expose, are now disused or forgotten, we find it difficult to enter into the humour or propriety of the characters. Yet even at this distance, we can perceive that truth of design, and strength of colouring in each, as highly entertain us with their representation or perusal; and render us equally sensible of the poet’s excellence, and art in his masterly performance: ‘But we may remark in general of such subjects, as an exact critic of great taste expresseth it, that they are a strong temptation to the writer, to exceed the bounds of truth and mediocrity in his draught of them at first, and are further liable to an imperfect and even unfair sentence from the reader afterwards. For the welcome reception which these pictures of prevailing local folly meet with on the stage, cannot but induce the poet almost without design, to inflame the representation; and the want of archetypes, in a little time makes it pass for immoderate, were it originally given with ever so much discretion and justice.’ [Hurd’s] HORACE’S Art of Poetry illustrated with English Notes, &c. p. 278. Add to this, that in presenting a character on the stage, the due distance and point of view should have a place in the poet’s consideration; and this may probably require some enlargement of the lineaments and features, provided that a just proportion and symmetry of parts, be observed in the composition of the whole. I do not mean that he should give us a distorted caricatura, in the room of an agreeable and pleasing picture; but if it be considered that many diverting pleasantries or actions of ridiculous humour, with lively dialogues in common life, would appear flat and insipid, and have little or no effect upon a general audience, when set before them in the plain and simple habit of nature and fact: the poet may possibly be under the necessity of bestowing on them some relief and ornament, from art; and of seasoning his conversations with a high poignancy of wit or repartee, adapted to the less exquisite taste of an undistinguishing populace. These causes concurring seem to have given rise to the opinion, that Jonson, in the portraiture of his characters, forbore to copy from real life. And as the preceding observations account for this opinion, with a probable verisimilitude, we are apt to flatter ourselves, they may be a fair representation and solution of the matter. In the collection of Jonson’s poems there are two Tragedies; and of each of these something should be said in reference to his conduct of the drama, and to his judgment in the choice of his Subjects. The poet himself appears to have placed no small value on these plays, and they are not without their proper share of merit; but as the piercing eye of criticism hath discovered errors and defects in both, let us attend to the faults which are

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 463

objected to them. And first, it is said the poet was unfortunately mistaken in the choice of his fable; the characters of Catiline and Sejanus are so well known, and are so infamous in history, that no kind of pity, the most amiable emotion in the spectator’s breast, can possibly be shown to the distresses which befal them; but to this, a reply is elsewhere given in the proper place, where the objection it self is made. (i, xiii–xviii) [Whalley then describes in full Hurd’s objections in his commentary on the Ars Poetica to Jonson’s imitations in Catiline: see No. 140, above.] ⋆⋆⋆ …we are likewise obliged to own that these mistakes in Jonson are in a great measure indefensible. For although the poet was conscious of what might possibly be objected to him upon these heads, yet he was so far from regarding them as errors, or imperfections in his poem, that he, in truth, considered them as beauties, and prided himself upon his translations as so many real excellencies, and the chief ornaments of his play. But he was misled, as the learned critic judiciously adds, by the beauty which these speeches appeared to have in the original composition, without attending to the peculiar laws of the drama, and the indecorum it must needs have in so very different a work. It must be acknowledged, however, in justice to Jonson, that he hath discovered great art and spirit in designing and supporting his characters; and that he hath occasionally deviated from the leading thread of the story, and varied the arrangement of circumstances, in the manner that was most conducive to draw out his characters, and display the ruling passion inherent in the breast of each. These remarks upon the Catiline, are in some degree applicable to the Sejanus of Jonson. In this indeed the narration from which he copied was less obvious and direct; and hence it demanded a greater share of judgment to combine and connect the distinct periods and members, to form a regular and consistent whole; but as the story lay before him, from which he drew his incidents, he copied with too close an attachment to historic composition; and in breach of the second rule, what he hath translated from the Latin, is expressed with too exact a conformity to the mode and letter of the original expression. And lastly, he hath adopted incidents which the law and nature of his work would reject. The play should naturally have ended with the fall and tragical death of Sejanus. For this reason the subsequent descriptions, taken from Juvenal, of the indignities and insults, offered by the multitude, both to himself and his statues, are wholly out of place. Nor was it less improper to describe with the attendant circumstances, the unfortunate ends of the son and daughter of Sejanus; who with brutal violence were dragged from home, and inhumanly put to death by the public executioner. But the poet intended to recount a tale of horror, and excite pity in the breast of the spectators, by relating the untimely fate of the innocent and tender sufferers; and this further contributed, in concurrence with the moral, to insinuate that divine vengeance would not fail to punish and exterminate the whole race of those, who contemned the providence and power of Heaven. The character of Jonson as a poet, may be discovered by attending to his character and disposition as a man; which would naturally give that prevailing cast to his comedies and poems, which in effect we find they have, (i, xx–xxii) [Quotes Hurd’s remarks in his commentary on Jonson’s nature.]

464 BEN JONSON

But it is here to be observed, that humour, which Jonson particularly aimed to express, is principally to be found in the inferior stations and lower classes of mankind; for as it is the excess of a prevailing passion, its influence will be there exerted with less confinement and controul from the restraints of education. The civility and politeness of good-breeding will keep within its due bounds that ebullition of temper, which would be apt to flow out to the annoyance and disgust of others. So that Jonson in exposing those follies, and lesser kinds of vices, which render men contemptible, was necessarily led to picture what was inordinate in a character, that he might give the fullest and strongest image of the original. To enter completely into the humour and propriety of Jonson’s characters, we should as it were drop the intervening period, and image to ourselves the manners and customs of the times wherein he lived, that so we may more perfectly comprehend his various references and allusions to them. But as this is a matter of real difficulty, the representation of many of his comedies must fail to produce the same delight in the spectator, as they naturally did when first acted; and therefore a correct edition, with explanatory notes, will give that satisfaction in the reading, which cannot be so well attained, from their performance on the stage. It is greatly to be wished indeed, that Jonson had possessed that poetic passion, and power to touch the heart, which would have made his dramas universal; equally felt and understood in all ages. But as in this point he must indisputably yield to Shakespear, so few of his characters can receive the same advantages from the best action and expression that ever added grace and energy to the stage. And in thus wanting Mr. Garrick’s performance, he wants that living explanation, which no comment of the most learned critic can possibly give, (i, xxiii–xxiv) ⋆⋆⋆ [Having acknowledged Garrick’s kindness in lending him the 1601 Every Man in his Humour and the 1609 The Case is Altered quartos:] Mr. Garrick hath always shewn great taste and judgment in doing justice to the genius of our old dramatists; by the revival of such pieces, from which the elegance of the present times could receive an agreeable entertainment. And Jonson is obliged to him for giving new life to Every Man in his Humour, in which by the proper cast of the several parts, and his own performance of a principal character, he hath displayed the excellencies of our old comic bard in their fullest and fairest glory. (i, xxv–xxvi) (b) From ‘The Life of Benjamin Jonson’.

His person was corpulent and large; and his face, if we may believe his admirers, resembled Menander’s, as the head of that poet is represented upon antient gems and medals: in like manner Vida is said to have resembled Virgil. His disposition was reserved, and saturnine; and sometimes not a little oppressed with the gloom of a splenetic imagination. He told Drummond, as an instance of this, that he had lain a whole night fancying he saw the Carthaginians and Romans, Turks, and Tartars, fighting on his great toe. He hath been often represented as of an envious, arrogant, over-bearing temper, and insolent and haughty in his converse: but these ungracious drawings were the performance of his enemies; who certainly were not sollicitous to give a flattering likeness in their portraits of the original. But considering the provocations he received, with the mean and contemptible talents of those who opposed him, what we condemn as vanity or conceit, might be only the exertions of conscious and insulted merit. He was laborious and

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 465

indefatigable in his studies, his reading was copious and extensive; his memory so tenacious and strong, that when turned of forty, he could have repeated all that he had ever wrote: his judgment accurate and solid; and often consulted by those who knew him well, in branches of very curious learning, and far remote from the flowery paths loved and frequented by the muses. The lord Falkland, in his elegy, celebrates him as an admirable scholar; and saith, that the extracts he took, and the observations which he made on the books he read, were themselves a treasure of learning, though the originals should happen to be lost. In his friendships he was cautious and sincere, yet accused of levity and ingratitude to his friends: but his accusers were the criminals; insensible of the charms, and strangers to the privileges of friendship. For the powers of friendship, not the least of virtues, can be only experienced by the virtuous and good; and with these Jonson was happily connected in the bonds of intimacy and affection. Randolph and Cartwright revered him as the great reformer, and as the father of the British stage; and gloried in the honorary title of his adopted sons: and Selden hath acknowledged the good offices which Jonson did him by his interest at court, when he had incurred the royal displeasure by publishing his History of Tithes. Stern and rigid as his virtue was, this Cato of poets was easy and social in the convivial meetings of his friends; and the laws of his Symposia, inscribed over the chimney of the Apollo, a room in the Devil-Tavern near Temple-Bar, where he kept his club, shew us that he was neither averse to the pleasures of conversation, nor ignorant of what would render it agreeable and improving. It is true that he was sparing in his commendations of the works of others, which probably gave occasion to accuse him of envy, and ill nature; but when he commends, he commends with sincerity and warmth. A man of sense is always cautious in giving characters; nor will an honest man applaud where he cannot approve; and Jonson well knew the people may admire, but to praise is an act of knowledge and of judgment. (i, lv–lvi) ⋆⋆⋆ By the death of Jonson his family itself became extinct, the only issue he left being his Plays and Poems; and their fate hath in some measure resembled his. Yet such is the felicity of their better fortunes, that surviving the attacks of envious contemporary rivals, they have received from the justice of discerning unprejudiced posterity, a fair, and an increasing fame. With those, whose taste for simple and striking copies of nature, is yet uncorrupted by the fastidious delicacy of fashionable refinements, the works of Jonson stand high in esteem: and as they are read from age to age, they will perpetuate his name with all the honours which his genius and his learning deserve, (i, lvii) (c) From the notes to Every Mar in his Humour.

But whether his oath can bind him, yea or no, Being not taken lawfully] [3.3.107–8] The character of Kitely is extremely well imagined, and supported with great propriety. His jealousy is constantly returning, and creates him fresh scruples in every thing he sets about. It was a question in casuistry, whether an oath was of any force, unless taken in form before a legal magistrate: the poet therefore brings this to his imagination, to fill him with groundless objections and throw him into the greater perplexity. Within these few years, we have seen the part of a Suspicious Husband represented on the stage,1 and drawn with that life and nature as did the utmost credit to the author. Yet Jonson, I believe, will be allowed to have set the pattern; and to have been the most faithful copier, may be deemed a sufficient share to a modern writer. (i, 73)

466 BEN JONSON

⋆⋆⋆ You’d mad the patient’st body in the world, &c.] [4.1.21–2] I shall here take the liberty to answer an objection, which may possibly be made to the manner in which I have printed this, and some other speeches of the play. I found them, as I believe, plain prose; and as such I have left them; though I am aware, that a very little alteration would have reduced them to a hobbling kind of measure, which we often meet with in our old comedians. This, however, is not Jonson’s manner: in the more serious parts of his drama, where comedy is allowed to raise her voice and breathe something of the tragic sublimity, he gives us very numerous and flowing verse; but in places less interesting and of less importance, he drops from his poetic flight into the humbler paces of prosaic narration. The case is otherwise, indeed, with Fletcher; who affects the metre in his common dialogue, and in his scenes of humour and burlesque much more than either Shakespear or Jonson. And these speeches we see happily rescued by his late very ingenious editors, from the deformity in which they appear in all the former copies, (i, 89–90) (d) From the notes to Every Man out of his Humour.

Black, rav’nous ruin, with her sail-stretch’d wings.] [Induction, l. 10] There is a sublimity in this and the preceding lines, which shews us that Jonson could have reached a nobler flight in the greater kinds of poetry, had he not cramped his genius by confining it, in conformity to the prejudices of the age, to a model unworthy of himself, and even not agreeable to his own taste. The author he copied after in his Sejanus and Catiline, was Seneca the tragedian; as we shall shew more distinctly, when we come to those plays. (i, 141) ⋆⋆⋆ somewhat like VETUS COMŒDIA.] [Induction, l.232] In the Vetus Comœdia, or old comedy, the learned know that personal characters were introduced by name, and much licence of abuse was tolerated. Jonson hath refrained from every thing of this nature; tho’ his enemies did not scruple to tax him with quarrelling with his friends, and afterwards representing them on the stage; and particularly in the characters of this very play. In what follows we may remark the most exact knowledge of the progress of ancient comedy, through its several stages: and the conclusion is a satire on the poets of the age, for their violation of the laws of writing. Our poet perfectly understood the dramatic unities, and was happy in his observance of them. (i, 149) ⋆⋆⋆ Fast. O, the most celestial, and full of wonder, &c.] [4.8.14] This interruption of Brisk’s is very artful in the poet: Carlo was more a man of the town, whose elysium was the inside of a tavern, or an ordinary, and not the presence-chamber at court; but Brisk, whose happiness centred in the circle of courtiers, may with great propriety break out into a rapturous harangue on the pleasures of a court life. (i, 252) ⋆⋆⋆ Mit. Whom should he personate in this, signior? Cor. Faith, I know not sir, observe him.] [5.4.67–8] The question of Mitis is natural enough, upon seeing so peculiar an extravagance: but the answer of Cordatus is not in the usual manner. It is rather an evasion of the question, than a satisfactory reply. He doth not attempt to clear the poet by a parallel example, either in some antient comic writer, or from what might be observed in common life; but puts off the inquirer’s curiosity, by desiring him to attend to what follows. This looks as if the matter wou’d not bear a very nice

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 467

examination, lest a discovery should be made of what the author did not chuse to have publickly known. Hence one is induced to imagine, that the character is personal; and that the humour exposed in it was the humour of a particular man. An author of the following age, places this suspicion out of all doubt. Cleaveland, in an elegy upon Jonson, refers to this very character; he mentions what our poet’s adversaries were wont to accuse him of; and from thence we find, that he was taxed with quarrelling with the person represented under the name of Carlo, and afterwards revenging himself by exposing his foibles on the stage. The verses of Cleaveland are as follow: [Quotes ll. 109–12 from what is in fact Mayne’s elegy in Jonsonus Virbius, No. 49 (h), above; the elegy appears in Cleveland’s Works (1699), p. 313, which Whalley quotes here.] Who was the real person intended by it, I cannot take upon me to determine. Our poet, in different places, purgeth himself from accusations of this sort, by professing to spare the party, and brand only the offence; and I believe he seldom trespassed against this rule. The Poetaster indeed must be excepted, which is a personal satire against Decker the poet, who first began the attack. But these instances, and more which may be taken notice of, confute the observation which some have made, that Jonson never copied from living manners, and that the characters of his plays were only passions or humours personized. (i, 271) (e) From the notes to Cynthia’s Revels.

Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep.] [4.6.3–4] In the party-disputes between admirers of Shakespear and Jonson, as the one was affirm’d to want learning, the other was said to have had no imagination; but there are instances in the works of both, sufficient to refute this opinion; and it may be observed of Jonson, that as he really possessed much reading and critical judgment, his poetry has a correctness and truth, which result from a close attention to the antient masters. This little hymn is delicate both in the sentiment and expression; the images are picturesque, the verse easy and flowing. Milton has a thought not unlike the lines above, which from the similitude of the expression, one is tempted to believe he took from hence, ‘Come, but keep thy wonted state With even step, and musing gate.’ Il Penseroso. [ll. 37–8] (i, 412) (f) From the notes to Poetaster.

Since the comic muse Hath prov’d so ominous to me, I will try If tragedy have a more kind aspect.] [Epilogue, ll. 222–4] But the aspect of the tragic muse, it is said, was so little favourable to the poet when in buskins, that even in the choice of his subject he failed: Sejanus and Catiline are historical characters so well known, that no distress which befals them can possibly raise any kind of pity, the chiefest and noblest passion belonging to tragedy, in the breast of the beholder. But pity is not the only passion, which the tragic poet is concerned with. To excite dread and terror in the mind of the spectator is equally the design of tragedy, with raising the softer and more tender emotions of the heart. Wickedness and guilt, when they are represented to an audience,

468 BEN JONSON

should naturally create no other sensations but those of fear and horrour; and the catastrophe should be designed as a monitory lesson, to deter others from perpetrating the like crimes. Our poet is not singular in the choice of his subjects. One of them has lately been exhibited on a stage, that is no way famous for presenting scenes of cruelty to the beholder. The rival wits of France, monsieur Crebillon in his Catalina [1748], and monsieur Voltaire in his Rome sauvé [1750], have actually pitched on the same event with Jonson, in their contest for the dramatic laurel. (ii, 123) (g) From the notes to Sejanus.

————The oracles are ceas’d, That only Caesar, with their tongue, might speak.] [1.503–4] The poet with great judgment lays hold on the common opinion of the cessation of oracles about this time, and turns it into a very artful piece of flattery. The fact may be false, but the received notions of Jonson’s age sufficiently justify the application. If the reader is desirous to know the sentiments of the learned with regard to the cessation of oracles at this time, I refer him to Vandale de Oraculis, and Fontenelle’s Historie des Oracles.2 (ii, 155) ⋆⋆⋆ Look upon Silius, and so learn to die.] [3.349] Silius (says the historian) imminentem damnationem voluntario fine prævertit. [Tacitus] Annal. l[iber].4 C[apitulum] 19.3 It doth not appear, however, that this happened in the Senate-house, or at the immediate time of his accusation: yet the liberty which the poet hath taken, is easily allowable. Afer has a part in this transaction not assigned him by Tacitus; but it is given him with the most utmost probability, and with the exactest preservation of character. For we may remark, to the honour of Jonson’s judgment, that whenever he departs from the thread of the narration, it is always with an improvement of the subject, and upon the strongest ground of presumption. Thus, by introducing Afer as a manager of the impeachment against Silius, he hath a proper opportunity of displaying the mercenary oratory, and art of the informers, prevalent in the reign of Tiberius, which are finely contrasted by the truly honest, and spirited replies of Silius. (ii, 190) ⋆⋆⋆ Much more to SLIGHTEN, or deny their powers.] [5.901] Slighten is the infinitive mood of the verb slight, with a Saxon ending, for the sake of the verse. Propriety of sentiment, and decorum of character, are what we are principally to look for in the plays of Jonson; especially in those, where the characters are known from history, and he is necessarily obliged to draw them like. Agreeably to this, the moral of the play hath an exact conformity to the action of the chief person in the drama. Sejanus is represented without any principle of conscience, ambitious, and a contemner of all religion, with the power and providence of the gods. His fall therefore, considered as a punishment for his neglect of the gods, must naturally insinuate, that obedience to them is the only foundation of happiness; and that lawless and irregular ambition is constantly attended with inseparable destruction. This is inculcated in these last lines. (ii, 262) (h) From the notes to Volpone.

Fellows, to MOUNT a BANK.] [2.2.1] …I cannot help thinking this episode to be rather an excrescence than a beauty, as it has no sort of connection with the rest of the play: yet the character is not destitute of humour, and possibly might be intended for some

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 469

particular person. However, it exposes with great life the taste of that state-intriguing age, in which it was easier to find a politician, than a man. (ii, 307–8) ⋆⋆⋆ Avoc. 1. We well think it. Land. You may think it. Avoc. 11. Let her o’ercome.] [4.6.14–15] There never was a character supported with more propriety, than this of Lady Would-be. She comes into the court in all the violence of passion, and having vented her rage in a hasty epithet or two, she relapses into her usual formality, and begins to compliment the judges. Tired with her breeding and her eloquence, they are obliged not to give her a reply, and proceed to the examination of the other parties. The preceding scene is a great instance of the power of avarice, when the poet brings the father and the husband, to bear testimony against the son and the wife. (ii, 374–5) ⋆⋆⋆ I cannot now afford it you so cheap. Volp. No?] [5.12.69–70] There is true comic humour in these dealings between Mosca and Volpone: and one cannot help observing, that at a time so critical to them both, the covetousness in their tempers defeats their several designs. An instance of great decorum in the poet, whose intention was to display an inherent avarice in every human breast. I do not see why Mr. Dryden should say there are two actions in this play; the first naturally ending with the fourth act; the second forced from it in the fifth.4 The action indeed is something varied, but it still tends to the disappointment and mortification of the pretenders to Volpone’s wealth. Yet, as he adds, this disguise of Volpone, tho’ not suited to his character, as a crafty or covetous person, agreed well enough with that of a voluptuary: and, by it, the poet gained the end at which he aimed, the punishment of vice, and the reward of virtue, both which that disguise produced. (ii, 405) (i) From the notes to The Alchemist.

My part a little fell in this last scene, Yet ’twas DECORUM.] [5.5.158–9] i.e. suitable to the decorum of character. The catastrophe of the play is well managed, and the discovery of the whole not injudiciously contrived. Our poet could not help telling his audience he thought so too. (iii, 137) (j) From the notes to Catiline.

————The peoples voices, and the free Tongues in the senate, bribed be.] [1.581–2] In this part of the chorus our poet had his eye upon the specimen belli civilis by Petronius Arbiter. Nec minor in campo furor est, emptique Quirites Ad prædam strepitumque lucri suffragia vertunt. Venalis populus, venalis curia patrum.5 The sentiments of Petronius furnished him with matter, not only in the present instance, but for the general design of the whole chorus. I will take leave to transcribe a few lines from the speech of Pluto to Fortune, which are made use of in the verses before these. En etiam mea regna petunt, perfossa dehiscit Molibus insanis tellus; jam montibus haustis Antra gemunt: & dum varrios lapis invenit usus, Inferni manes cælum sperare jubentur.6

470 BEN JONSON

Was I to add more, I should copy almost the whole poem. Jonson, I think, does not appear to any great advantage in the choruses to this play. My friend Mr. Sympson is also of the same opinion: he says, the sentiments in them are not sufficiently great, nor his measures at all imitative of the ancients; that variety of numbers which runs thro’ all the Greek tragic poets, seems never once to have been his aim. But I imagine Seneca, not Sophocles or Aeschylus, was what he copied after, and ’tis then no wonder that he succeeded no better. (iii, 168) ⋆⋆⋆ Ful. And doth dance rarely? Gal. Excellent! so well, As a bald senator made a jest, and said, ’Twas better than an honest woman need.] [2.1.49–51] The poet throughout this whole character of Sempronia, hath his eye upon his author Sallust: he had faithfully selected the particulars, yet varied the arrangement of them, in a manner different from the historian’s relation. Sallust, in drawing the picture of this celebrated lady, hath the following strokes: Psallere, saltare elegantius quam necesse est probæ.7 Jonson has made Fulvia’s attendant express herself in the same terms, but as coming from the dry gravity of a conscript father. This gives an air of humour to the whole: and is justly adapted to the vein of loquacity, characteristic of my lady’s woman. [Goes on to quote Dryden on the mixture of comedy and tragedy in Catiline and in Sejanus: see No. 67, above.] (iii, 171) ⋆⋆⋆ Methinks I see death and the furies waiting What we will do, and all the heav’n at leisure For the great spectacle.] [5.412–23] The image here given is extremely sublime, and approaches very nearly to those terrible graces, which the critic has attributed to Homer amongst the antients, and which Shakespear possessed in a manner superior to any modern whatsoever. (iii. 263) ⋆⋆⋆ As if she meant to hide the NAME OF THINGS.] [5.636] Mr. Sympson conjectures that the frame of things was the original reading: but as our poet was so adventurous a dealer in the learned languages, I acquiesce in the expression of the text. My friend will readily recollect, that in those languages the names of things is equivalent to, and often means the things themselves. The spirit of this speech is truely noble, the images of sublimity and horrour it abounds with, are drawn with a happy mixture of poetry and judgment, and disposed with equal exactness and art. For the honour of our poet, it must be added that this speech is not a translation: the whole is derived from the sources of his own imagination, with no assistance from his classic masters. I look on it as the most capital description in all the works of Jonson. (iii, 270) (k) From the notes to Bartholomew Fair.

If there be never a SERVANT-MONSTER i’ the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a NEST OF ANTIQUES?] [Induction, ll. 127–8] Our author, and who can help it, is still venting his sneers at Shakespear. The servant-monster is the character of Caliban in the Tempest: the nest of antiques is the clowns who dance in the Winter’s Tale; and, lest he should be thought not to speak plainly enough, he expressly mentions those plays in the next sentence. I am afraid the reader will think but ill either of Jonson’s judgement, or his candour, when he thus ridicules what has been generally admired by men of real taste: but I believe the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 471

sneer was designed not so much to ridicule Shakespear for his invention, as the passion of the mob for spectacles of this kind, (iii, 282) [The note goes on to discuss the dress and appearance of Caliban and the clowns of Twelfth Night.] (l) From the notes to The Sad Shepherd. ———————EARINE, Who had her very being, and her name, With the first knots or buddings of the spring, &c.] [1.5.43–5] The English reader will perhaps require to be told, that Earine is derived from a Greek word signifying the spring, which is the allusion of these lines; but I hope his sagacity does not want a monitor, to point out the exquisite delicacy of the following lines, and indeed of the whole speech. The sentiments are wonderfully pleasing, the verses harmonious and soft. (v, 111) ⋆⋆⋆ ———————Hark, hark, hark, the foul Bird!] [1.5.61–2] Jonson does not appear to have had much conception of those breaks and rests, or of adapting the sound of his verse to the sense, which are the chief beauty of our best modern poets; but in the words above, there is an excellence of this kind, and as it seems by design too, which is extremely striking. The three long syllables preceding the Iambic foot at the close of the one verse, which is immediately connected with the beginning of the other, and the pause placed upon the first syllable, are as fully expressive of the sentiment as can possibly be imagined. ———————H rk! h rk! h rk! th•e fōul B rd! There is nothing finer in all Shakespear or Milton. (v, 112) ⋆⋆⋆ Mar. —You do know as soon As the ASSAY is taken] [1.6.36] To take assay or say, is to draw a knife along the belly of the deer, beginning at the brisket, to discover how fat he is. The poet has given us infinitely too much of this hunting jargon, which, like most other cant terms, is hardly explicable, and not worth the knowing. (v, 117) ⋆⋆⋆ [Note to the end of the play.] I cannot but lament with the reader, the loss of the remaining parts of this play, which we could have born with the greater patience, had even this act been fortunately completed. We have no account how it came down to us in this mutilated condition; and conjectures can be at best but precarious. Possibly it might have been in the number of those pieces, which were accidentally burnt; tho’ indeed there is no particular mention of it in the Execration upon Vulcan: or Jonson might have undertaken it in the decline of his days, and did not live to finish it; as was the case with his tragedy of Mortimer, and to this conjecture we are induced by the first line of the prologue, ‘He that hath feasted you these forty years.’ There is indeed one reason, which might lead us to believe, that the poet left it unfinished by design. He beheld with great indignation the ungenerous treatment, which

472 BEN JONSON

Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess met with from the people, at its first appearance; and he was witness also to the small encouragement that was shewn to its revival, under the patronage of Charles I. Possibly these circumstances deterred him from going through with the performance. As his composition was of a kindred nature to that of Fletcher, he might presage the same unfortunate event, should he ever introduce it on the stage. So that posterity can only bewail the perversity of taste, in their injudicious ancestors, whose discouragement of the first, contributed to deprive us of the second pastoral drama, that would do honour to the nation. What we now have, serveth only to increase our regret; like the remains of some ancient master, which beget in us the most inexpressible desire of a perfect statue by the same hand. When a work is not completed by its author, or maimed by the hand of time, one would either wish the remains to be inconsiderable, or the beauties less exquisite and charming. In the former case the deficiency is not so much deplored, from our inability to judge of the perfection of the whole; and in the latter, we are very little anxious for what appears to be hardly worth preserving; but when a piece is so far advanced, as to convince us of the excellence of the artist, and of its own superiour delicacy, we are naturally touched with concern for what is lost, and set a proper value on the parts which still subsist. (v, 151–2) (m) From the notes to The Case is Altered.

Jaq. Sir! God’s my life, sir! sir! call me sir!] [3.2.13] The character of Jaques is formed upon that of Euclio in the Aulularia of Plautus: and is drawn with that masterly expression which distinguisheth the works of Jonson. The scene here between Christophero and Jacques, and what follows between the count and him, is copied from what passes between Euclio and Megadorus; but with so high an improvement, as determines the palm of applause in favour of our author. The original here is, Non temerarium est, ubi dives blande appellat pauperem.8 (vii, 334) NOTES 1 Benjamin Hoadley, The Suspicious Husband (1747). 2 Antonius Van Dale, De Oraculis ethnicorum dissertationes duae (Amsterdam 1683); Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles (Paris 1687). 3 ‘anticipated the impending condemnation by a voluntary end’. 4 See No. 67, above. 5 ‘“The same madness in public life, the true-born Roman is bought, and changes his vote for plunder and the cry of gain. The people are corrupt, the house of senators is corrupt”’: Satyricon, ch. 119. 6 ‘Aye, they grasp even at my kingdom. The earth is hewn through for their madmen’s foundations and gapes wide, now the mountains are hollowed out until the caves groan, and while men turn nature’s stone to their various purposes, the ghosts of hell are bid to have hopes of winning heaven’: Satyricon, ch. 120. 7 ‘To play the lyre and dance more skilfully than an honest woman need’: Bellum Catalinae, 25. 2. 8 ‘There’s something behind it when a rich man puts on smooth airs with a poor one’: Anulularia, l. 184.

145. Richard Hurd, Jonson’s imitations 1757

From A Letter to Mr. Mason; On the Marks of Imitation, dated 15 August 1757. Hurd proposes various rules by which imitation can be detected, and for the typical practice of imitation. His Letter elaborates on the ideas expressed in ‘A Discourse of Poetical Imitation’, appended to the 1753 edition of his Horace (see No. 140, above). There he concludes that the principal cause of the degeneracy of taste is the ‘ANXIOUS DREAD OF IMITATION IN POLITE AND CULTIVATED WRITERS’ (ii, 230). You may be sure then, the writers of that period abound in imitations. The best poets boasted of them as their sovereign excellence. And you will easily credit, for instance, that B.Johnson was a servile imitator, when you find him on so many occasions little better than a painful translator. I foresee the occasion I shall have, in the course of this letter, to weary you with citations; and would not therefore go out of my way for them. Yet, amidst a thousand instances of this sort in Johnson, the following, I fancy, will entertain you. The Latin verses, you know, are of Catullus. Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis, Ignotus pecori, nullo convulsus aratro, Quem mulcent auræ, firmat sol, educat imber, Multi illum pueri, multæ optavere puellæ. Idem, quum tenui carptus defloruit ungui, Nulli illum pueri, nullæ optavere puellæ.1 It came in Johnson’s way, in one of his masks, to translate this passage; and observe with what industry he has secured the sense, while the spirit of his author escapes him. Look, how a flower that close in closes grows, Hid from rude cattle, bruised with no plows, Which th’air doth stroke, sun strengthen, show’rs shoot high’r, It many youths, and many maids desire; The same, when cropt by cruel hand is wither’d, No youth at all, no maidens have desir’d. [Hym. 812–17] —It was not thus, you remember, that Ariosto and Pope have translated these fine verses. (10–11) ⋆⋆⋆

474 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

…when the question is of any particular writer, how far and in what instances you may presume on his being a profess’d imitator, much will depend on the certain knowledge you have of his Age, Education, and Character. When all these circumstances meet in one man, as they have done in others, but in none perhaps so eminently as in B.Johnson, wherever you find an acknowledged likeness, you will do him no injustice to call it imitation. (14) ⋆⋆⋆ [Hurd suggests that Shakespeare might have come by his classical imagery from the English books of his time.] …if he had never look’d into books, or convers’d with bookish men, he might have learn’d almost all the secrets of paganism (so far, I mean, as a poet had any use of them) from the MASKS of B. Johnson; contriv’d by that poet with so pedantical an exactness, that one is ready to take them for lectures and illustrations on the antient learning, rather than exercises of modern wit. The taste of the age, much devoted to erudition, and still more, the taste of the Princes, for whom he writ, gave a prodigious vogue to these unnatural exhibitions. And the knowledge of antiquity, requisite to succeed in them, was, I imagine, the reason that Shakespear was not over fond to try his hand at these elaborate trifles. Once indeed he did, and with such success as to disgrace the very best things of this kind we find in Johnson. The short Mask in the Tempest is fitted up with a classical exactness. But it’s chief merit lies in the beauty of the Shew, and the richness of the poetry. Shakespear was so sensible of his Superiority, that he could not help exulting a little upon it, where he makes Ferdinand say, This is a most majestic Vision, and Harmonious charming Lays— [4.1.118–19] ’Tis true, another Poet, who possess’d a great part of Shakespear’s Genius and all Johnson’s learning has carried this courtly entertainment to it’s last perfection. But the Mask at Ludlow Castle was, in some measure, owing to the fairy Scenes of his Predecessor; who chose this province of Tradition, not only as most suitable to the wildness of his vast creative imagination, but as the safest for his unlettered Muse to walk in. For here he had much, You know, to expect from the popular credulity, and nothing to fear from the classic superstition of that time. (24–5) ⋆⋆⋆ B.Johnson, in his Prologue to the Sad Shepherd, is opening the subject of that poem. The sadness of his shepherd is For his lost Love, who in the TRENT is said To have miscarried; ’las! what knows the head Of a calm river, whom the feet have drown’d! [ll. 23–5] The reflexion in this place is unnecessary and even impertinent. Who besides ever heard of the feet of a river? Of arms, we have. And so it stood in Johnson’s original. Greatest and Fairest Empress, know you this, Alass! no more than Thames’ calm head doth know Whose meads his arms drown, or whose corn o’er-flow. Dr. DONNE. [Satyres, 5.28–30] The poet is speaking of the corruption of the courts of justice, and the allusion is perfectly fine and natural. Johnson was tempted to bring it into his prologue by the mere

BEN JONSON 475

beauty of the sentiment. He had a river at his disposal, and would not let slip the opportunity. But ‘his unnatural use of it detects his imitation.’ (37–8) ⋆⋆⋆ The instance I am going to give, will afford you more pleasure. Is there a passage in Milton You read with more admiration, than this in the Penseroso? Entice the dewy-feather’d sleep; And let some strange mysterious dream Wave at his wings in airy stream; Of lively portraiture display’d Softly on my eye-lids laid. [ll. 146–50] Would You think it possible now that the groundwork of this fine imagery should be laid in a passage of Ben Johnson? Yet so we read, or seem to read in his Vision of Delight. Break, Phant’sy, from thy cave of cloud, And spread thy purple wings: Create of airy forms a stream, And tho’ it be a waking dream, Yet let it like an odour rise To all the senses here And fall like sleep upon their eyes Or musick in their ear. [ll. 44–54] It is a delicate matter to analyze such passages as these; which, how exquisite soever in the poetry, when estimated by the fine phrenzy of a Genius, hardly look like sense when given in plain prose. But if You give me leave to take them in pieces, I will do it, at least, with reverence. We find then, that Fancy is here employ’d in one of her nicest operations, the production of a day-dream; which both poets represent as an airy form, or forms streaming in the air, gently falling on the eye-lids of her entranc’d votary. So far their imagery agrees. But now comes the mark of imitation I would point out to you. Milton carries the idea still farther, and improves finely upon it, in the conception as well as expression. Johnson evokes fancy out of her cave of cloud, those cells of the mind, as it were, in which during her intervals of rest, and when unemploy’d, fancy lies hid; and bids her, like a Magician, create this stream of forms. All this is just and truly poetical. But Milton goes further. He employs the dewy-feather’d sleep as his Minister in this machinery. And the mysterious day-dream is seen waving at his wings in airy stream. Johnson would have Fancy immediately produce this Dream. Milton more poetically, because in more distinct and particular imagery, represents Fancy as doing her work by means of sleep; that soft composure of the mind abstracted from outward objects, in which it yields to these phantastic impressions. You see then a wonderful improvement in this addition to the original thought. And the notion of dreams waving at the wings of sleep is, by the way, further justified by what Virgil feigns of their sticking or rather fluttering on the leaves of his magic tree in the infernal regions. But it is curious to observe how this improvement itself arose from hints suggested by his original. From Johnson’s dream, falling, like sleep upon their eyes, Milton took his feather’d sleep, which he impersonates so properly; And from Phant’sy’s spreading her purple wings, a circumstance, not so immediately connected with Johnson’s design of creating of airy forms a stream, he catched the idea of Sleep spreading her wings, and to good purpose, since the airy steam of forms was to wave at them.

476 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

However, Johnson’s image, is, in itself incomparable. It is taken from a winged insect breaking out of it’s Aurelia state, it’s cave of cloud, as it is finely called: Not unlike that of Mr. Pope, So spins the Silk-worm small it’s slender store, And labours till it clouds itself all o’er. IV. Dunc. φ. 253. And nothing can be juster than this allusion. For the antients always pictured FANCY and HUMAN-LOVE with Insect’s wings. (51–4) NOTE 1 ‘As a flower springs up secretly in a fenced garden, unknown to the cattle, torn by no plough, which the winds caress, the sun strengthens, the shower draws forth, many boys, many girls desire it; when the same flower fades, nipped by a sharp nail, no boys, no girls desire it’: Poems, 62.39–42.

146. Arthur Murphy, articles in The London Chronicle 1757

From numbers of The London Chronicle for 5–8 March, 31 March–2 April, and 2–5 April. Unsigned, but assigned to Murphy by John P.Emery, ‘Murphy’s Criticisms in the London Chronicle’, PMLA (1939), liv, 1099–104. Murphy completes the series in the number for 5–7 April with an essay comparing the character Strickland in Benjamin Hoadley’s The Suspicious Husband with Kitely. (a) 5–8 March 1757: from ‘The Theatre. No. 20’. DRURY-LANE, March 7. Was performed Ben Johnson’s Alchymist…. [Quotes Whalley’s definition of alchemy and his reference to a dispute in Jonson’s time about a particular alchemist, from The Works of Ben Jonson (1756), iii, 6–7.] However, as the Circumstances of this Dispute are not interesting now, and as the Foible ridiculed in this Piece is now almost obliterated, it follows of course, that the Humour appears frequently unintelligible, and loses its Poignancy. This Play sets out finely in the Midst of Things: The Plot is admirably conducted; and the fourth Act is, perhaps, one of the finest, for Contrivance, in the English Drama. We may venture, notwithstanding, to assert, that the Alchymist owes its present Reception on the Stage, to the inimitable Performance of Mr. Garrick. It is, indeed, no wonder, that all Degrees of People conspire to applaud the Performer, who has routed all the noblest Emotions of the Soul, when they see him descending to an Imitation of Nature in her meanest Littlenesses of Action. And yet how admirably does he exhibit the minutest Circumstances, with the exactest Precision, without Buffoonry or Grimace: —There is no twisting of Features, no Squinting, but all is as correct as if a real Tobacco Boy were before us. It is really surprizing how he, who has occasionally looked unutterable Things, can present us such a Face of Inanity: The Actor who can amazingly reach the Sublime in a Lear, or Hamlet, and then exhibit the most ridiculous Appearances, must be possessed of such two-fold and opposite Powers, as hardly ever before concentered in one Man, and are not likely to form such a Tragi-comic Genius again. (i, 231) (b) 31 March–2 April, 1757: from ‘The Theatre. No. 29’.

DRURY-LANE, March 31, 1757.

478 BEN JONSON

This Evening was performed, to one of the most numerous and polite Audiences that have been seen this Season (for the Benefit of Mr. Beard) Ben Jonson’s Comedy, called, Every Man in his Humour. If we consider that this Piece was exhibited in the Year 1598, being near 160 Years ago, it must be allowed that it is a Proof of an uncommon Genius to entertain us at this Time of Day with Ideas and Manners totally obliterated. It shews that the Painter’s Pencil must have been faithful to Nature, otherwise we should hardly please ourselves, at present, with Portraits whose Originals are no more; for, excepting the Picture of Jealousy in the Drawing of Kitely, there is not one Personage in the whole Groupe known to our modern Critics. Besides, the Business lies so much in what we call middle Life, or perhaps low Life, and in Parts of the Town disgustful to People of Fashion, such as the Old Jewry, Lothbury, &c. that nothing but the strong Colouring of old Ben could support the Piece. It is worth observing that the Scene of this Play was at first fixed in Italy, and the Names of the Dramatis Personæ were exotic, such as Lorenzo de Pazzai senior, Lorenzo junior, Thorello, &c. But our Author’s Discernment soon perceived the Absurdity of giving a foreign Drapery to English Personages, and exhibiting the Manners of Cheapside on the Rialto. He therefore, by a poetical Act of Parliament, changed their Names, and fixed their Residence in their own Country. Though there remains still, as is judiciously observed by the ingenious Mr. Whalley in his late Edition of this Author, a very remarkable Absurdity. [Quotes Whalley on the survival of the reference to poisoning in the 1616 Every Man in his Humour: see No. 144(a), above.] ⋆⋆⋆ It may not be improper to take Notice, that according to the modern Acceptation of the Word Humour, this Piece does not by any Means answer the Title. A Critic of these Days would naturally expect a Set of Humourists, or Men deeply tinged with Habits and Oddities discolouring their whole Conduct; instead of which we have but one Character of that cast, which is Kitely; Old Knowell having no peculiar Mark; his Son and Wellbred being merely young Fellows upon Town; Stephen and Matthew two contemptible Half fools; and in short, all the rest, excepting Bobadill and Brainworm having no distinguishing Characteristic. Bobadill’s Oddities are not strong enough to denominate him an Humourist; he has indeed a ridiculous Affectation of Courage and military Skill; and when he takes a Kicking, he affords us a very laughable Contrast. Brainworm is an impudent notable Fellow, and diverts by the various Appearances he assumes: And Justice Clement is an hearty chearful old Fellow, but has no particular Bias to the Gratification of any prevailing Humour, or whimsical Turn of Mind. The Poet has two Passages, one in this Play, and the other in Every Man out of his Humour, which may serve to inform us of what he intended in the Title. [Quotes EMI, 3.4.14–26, and EMO, Induction, ll. 105–9.] In this latter Passage the Author shews us that he had formed an exact Idea of Humour in the strict Sense of the Word: But we apprehend, when he called the Play now before us Every Man in his Humour, he meant to be understood in the former Sense, and intended to shew us a Set of Men following their Affectations. What was usually called Manners in a Play began now, says the above-mentioned ingenious Editor, to be called Humours; the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 479

Word was new, and the Use or rather Abuse of it was excessive. We should therefore be inclined to think that Ben Johnson took Advantage of a Phrase in Vogue, and intended merely an Exhibition of Manners or Humours in the loose Sense of the Word, as it was commonly used; and not a Picture of People under the Operation of one strong Foible, not vainly assumed out of Levity, or imitative Folly, but rooted in the Mind, and engrossing all their Thoughts. Kitely indeed is a Character of this latter Class, and his Spirits and Powers all run one Way, which may be said to be a Humour. Thus much we thought proper to remark concerning the general Idea of the Manners and Characters of this Play. The main Action turns on the Jealousy of Kitely: To shew this Foible in ridiculous Appearances, and to hold up a Mirror, where it may see itself, is the Poet’s principal Scope; though all the other Characters are busy in their own separate Walks, and have their own subordinate Pursuits. How far they all conduce to forward the chief Business, and how they are blended together, so as to form one coherent and entire whole, shall be our Enquiry in our next Paper; when we shall incidentally animadvert on the Sentiment and Diction, and shall give our Opinion of the acting of this Piece; there being Matters that would lead us beyond the Bounds of these occasional Criticisms, were we to pursue them further at present. (i, 318–19) (c) 2–5 April 1757: from ‘The Theatre. No. 30’.

Continuation of Remarks on Every Man in his Humour. Mr. Dryden has somewhere compared a well-wrought Comedy to a Country Dance, where two or more lead off, the rest fall in by Degrees, till they all mingle in the sprightly Tumult; then they separate into several petty Divisions; detached Parties are made from the main Body, and at length they all meet together again, and form one entire harmonious Movement. This Remark we think perfectly applicable to the Play now under Examination: We have already mentioned the principal Personages of the Piece, with a short Account of their Manners or Humours. How exquisite is the Poet’s Skill in grouping these together! While each Person has his own By-Concerns, he helps forward the main Action, and they are all brought together, and made acquainted with each other by Means probable and natural. Perhaps no Writer had greater Art in the Conduct of his Plots than Johnson: He is always sure to prepare us for every Character worthy our Notice, and this he does, quasi aliud agens, as if minding other Business, in the Course of which we receive accidental Notices of the Person, who is afterwards to appear; and thus our Expectation is raised before we see him engaged in any Scene of Action. Old Knowell opens this Play, and the Letter from Wellbred, who lives in Kitely’s Family, to young Knowell, gives us, casually as it were, a further Insight into the Business: It promises us more new Characters, and the suburb Humour of Master Stephen are likely to be entertaining, when contrasted by the City Fop. Then again, how judiciously is Bobadil described, and after the Account of his peculiar Oaths and assumed Valour, his mean Condition is nicely touched by his Landlord’s saying, ‘He owes me forty Shillings, my Wife lent him out of her Purse by Sixpence a Time.’ Bobadil’s Affectation is finely kept up, and we find too that he is one of Wellbred’s Rioters; and he likewise prepares us for the Character of Downright: We are thus let into a Knowledge of all the Dramatis Personæ, except Kitely, whose Jealousy being of a secret Nature, that Matter could only come from himself. And how finely is this developed! His Fear of being known to be jealous acquaints us with it; and Wellbred’s Followers give Occasion to all his Suspicions. It is observable that Kitely and Othello complain of an Head-ach, when first their Wives come to them, amidst their

480 BEN JONSON

Suspicions. The Part Brainworm takes in thwarting Old Knowell’s Purposes, is diverting, and serves to puzzle Matters till the Business is worked up to a Crisis, which happens from the Rendezvous of Wellbred’s Revellers at Kitely’s House. Then, in order to favour their separate Schemes, how artfully is it contrived that Brainworm should send Old Knowell to Cob’s (a suspected House) in Quest of his Son, and that Wellbred should send Kitely in Quest of his Wife, and the Wife in Search of her Husband, to the same Place; which occasions their being all brought before Justice Clement, for whom we have been sufficiently prepared during the preceding Parts of the Play. Through Brainworm it likewise happens that Bobadil and Downright meet at the Justice’s, where every thing being cleared up, Wellbred, Young Knowell, and Kitely’s Sister, are sent for to the Tavern, then called the Windmill, which then stood, as Mr. Whalley tells us in a Note, at the Corner of the Old Jewry towards Lothbury. Thus very artificially all Parties are brought together; the Denouement is skilfully made out; Kitely is convinced of his Error, and the jolly Temper of the old Justice prevails on them to conclude the Evening in Chearfulness and Good humour. If the Limits of our Paper would permit, we could with Pleasure review separately the Characters of Kitely and Bobadil, the two conspicuous Figures in this Piece; but this perhaps is unnecessary, as they are both so well performed by Mr. Garrick and Mr. Woodward. The latter, in our Opinion, never conceived a Character better than that of Bobadil, who is the best Braggadocio on the Stage; his Assurance has a Mixture of Modesty, and is heightened by it: While he pretends to be a consummate Master of every Branch of military Knowledge as well as Courage, he protests he has only some small Rudiments of the Science, ‘as to know his Distance or so.’ —When he is sure his Friends will prevent Mischief, he begs them to let his Enemy come on with ‘I won’t kill him,’ and when at last he takes a Beating, ‘he is planet-struck, fascinated, &c.’ —All this Mr. Woodward performs with such a Reserve and Gravity, and such a judicious Jeu de Theatre, that he is justly a Favourite with the Audience all through the Piece. Were we to examine Kitely we should find the Suspicious Husband to be is some Measure copied from it: The Scenes where both those Characters are tempted to confer with their own Domestics, and are yet afraid to do it, and then continue about it and about it, palpably resemble each other. Were we to give the Preference to either, we should declare the modern to have lopped Excrescences, and to have therefore rendered his Scene a juster Imitation of Nature, where there is nothing too often touched nor nothing overdone. But the former has the Advantage of Mr. Garrick’s Performance; in this Actor every Thing has Manners, every Thing has real Life, and whatever his Author may have done, he does not any where exceed the natural Working of Jealousy. But this Disquisition must be adjourned till he performs this Part again, when we shall trace Mr. Woodward and Mr. Garrick through all their various Shapes in this justly admired Comedy. (i, 327)

147. Thomas Wilkes on Jonson and on Jonson actors of the day 1759

From A General View of the Stage (1759). Thomas Wilkes (d. 1786) was a Dubliner and a friend of Garrick’s. A Comedy ought to have one main design, that carries through it one or two characters in a manner more conspicuous than the rest: and to compass this design, a chain of pleasing events should contribute, so linked as to have the appearance of accidental introduction; to wear nothing of force; nothing strained, nor seemingly artful. In Every Man in his Humour, for example, the main design is to cure a wrong-headed husband of a ridiculous, ill-grounded jealousy; we never lose sight of the husband and wife through the whole Play, until we find them made friends, and the husband cured of his folly in the catastrophe. (39) ⋆⋆⋆ [On Garrick’s comic roles.] It is almost impossible for us to reconcile to ourselves, that one and the same person should vary from the sprightly Lothario,1 and the princely Hamlet, to the mean Tobaccoboy; yet in Abel Drugger he is as inimitable as in the other two. The stupid confusion which he shews at breaking the urinal, and his satisfaction at going out without its being taken notice of, are peculiar to himself. The introducing this incident was first owing entirely to accident. It happened to old Cibber, who was allowed to play this character well. He, while the other personages were employed, rather than stand idle, was fiddling about the table of the Alchymist; and by way of filling up time, took up the urinal, and held it to the light, when it by chance slipping through his fingers, broke to pieces; and he had presence of mind to put on an air of distress happy to the time and the place; it told to admirable purpose. He played the part afterwards as usual; but the audience obliged him to restore the accidental addition; and it has been ever since retained by every other performer. Abel Drugger is certainly the standard of low comedy; and Mr. Garrick’s playing it the standard of acting in this species of comedy. How beautifully does he paint the jealousy of common life in Kitely, in ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ The anxiety and fears here natural to the part, and the aukward endeavour at disguising the ruling passion, are capital, both in the poet and the player, particularly where the husband unawares drops it that he has been,

482 BEN JONSON

—pointed at as one Disturbed with jealousy. Dame Kitely. Why were you ever jealous? Kite. What? —ha! never! never! ha, ha ha! She stabs me home! —Jealous of thee! No, do not believe it—Speak low, my love.2 Garrick’s laugh here is, as his wife afterwards expresses it, ‘Seemingly without mirth, constrained, and affected to the utmost.’ His supposed detection of old Knowell, in an intrigue with his wife, at Cob’s house, is a scene which would make an exceeding good picture. In a few words here, before the justice, and, indeed, through the whole part, he shews a deep knowledge of the human heart; and it is equal to any acting that ever was seen. (257–9) [On Shuter as a comedian.] The setness and risible turn of his features diffuse a peculiar humour thro’ all the parts he plays in low Comedy. He has a fine vacancy of look, an inexpressible and inimitable simplicity in Master Stephen, which is finely contrasted by the blustering air of Bobadil. (300–1) NOTES 1 In Rowe’s The Fair Penitent. 2 From Act IV, Scene iii of Garrick’s adaptation of the play: Garrick, The Dramatic Works (1798), i, 202–3.

148. Edward Young, Jonson and the load of learning 1759

From Conjectures an Original Composition. In a letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (1759). Young (1683–1765) was nearly eighty when he wrote this book. He had become famous for his Night Thoughts (1742–5), characterized by an edifying religious gloom. His Conjectures were admired by Klopstock, among others, and the German poet wrote a poem on Young’s death. Johnson, in the serious drama, is as much an Imitator, as Shakespeare is an Original. He was very learned, as Sampson was very strong, to his own hurt: Blind to the nature of Tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it; we see nothing of Johnson, nor indeed, of his admired (but also murdered) antients; for what shone in the Historian is a cloud on the Poet; and Cataline might have been a good play, if Salust had never writ. Who knows if Shakespeare might not have thought less, if he had read more? Who knows if he might not have laboured under the load of Johnson’s learning, as Enceladus under Ætna? His mighty Genius, indeed, thro’ the most mountainous oppression would have breathed out some of his inextinguishable fire; yet, possibly, he might not have risen up into that giant, that much more than common man, at which we now gaze with amazement, and delight. Perhaps he was as learned as his dramatic province required; for whatever other learning he wanted, he was master of two books, unknown to many of the profoundly read, tho’ books, which, the last conflagration alone can destroy; the book of Nature, and that of Man. These he had by heart, and has transcribed many admirable pages of them, into his immortal works. These are the fountain-head, whence the Castalian streams of original composition flow; and these are often mudded by other waters, tho’ waters in their distinct chanel, most wholesome and pure: As two chymical liquors, separately clear as crystal, grow foul by mixture, and offend the sight. So that he had not only as much learning as his dramatic province required but, perhaps, as it could safely bear. Dryden, destitute of Shakespeare’s Genius, had almost as much learning as Johnson, and, for the buskin, quite as little taste. (80–2)

484

149. Charles Churchill, Jonson’s judgement 1761

From Churchill’s poem The Rosciad (1761). This text from his Poems (1763). The poem describes the imaginary trial of various actors to determine who should take the place of the famous Roman actor Roscius. Shakespeare and Jonson are chosen as judges. (They award Garrick Roscius’ chair at the end of the poem.) The poem gained Churchill (1731–64) fame and success for its often savage satires on contemporary actors. As well as the references below to the performances of Woodward as Bobadil and Garrick as Kitely in productions of Every Man in his Humour, there is an admiring reference to William O’Brien’s performance as Master Stephen in the play (ll. 415–16; p. 20). Next JOHNSON sat, in antient learning train’d, His rigid Judgment Fancy’s flights restrain’d, Correctly prun’d each wild luxuriant thought, Mark’d out her course, nor spar’d a glorious fault. The book of man he read with nicest art, And ransack’d all the secrets of the heart; Exerted Penetration’s utmost force, And trac’d each passion to its proper source, Then, strongly mark’d, in liveliest colours drew, And brought each foible forth to public view. The Coxcomb felt a lash in ev’ry word, And fools hung out, their brother fools deterr’d. His comic humour kept the world in awe, And Laughter frightn’d Folly more than Law. (ll. 271–84; p. 14) ⋆⋆⋆ [The poet has criticized Woodward for his grimaces and gesticulations.] But when bold Wits, not such as patch up plays, Cold and correct in these insipid days, Some comic character, strong-featur’d, urge To probability’s extremest verge, Where modest judgement her decree suspends, And for a time, nor censures, nor commends,

486 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Where critics can’t determine on the spot, Whether it is in Nature found or not, There WOODWARD safely shall his pow’rs exert, Nor fail of favour where he shows desert. Hence he in Bobadil such praises bore, Such worthy praises, Kitely scarce had more. (ll. 383–94; p. 19)

150. Garrick as Abel Drugger 1762

Unsigned review of The Alchemist in The Universal Museum for January 1762. The review is dated 22 January, but it must refer to the performance at Drury Lane on 23 January. Garrick had first played Abel Drugger on 21 March 1743. To read this play without at the same time forming some idea of Mr. Garrick’s excellency in acting the part of Abel Drugger, one would not suppose it possible that any thing the least extraordinary could be made of it; and this is the strongest proof of the actor’s genius who performs the part so inimitably well. In this low part it is absolutely necessary to exclude every idea but those which might have occurred to the tobacconist, which would take in no extensive concatination. Mr. Garrick (if I may use the expression) sinks into the character; and so wonderfully adapts every attitude and motion to it, that we are surprized at the close resemblance, or rather the very appearance of nature before our eyes. When the Doctor invents the hieroglyphic of his name, and he cries out in a mixture of surprize and pleasure, ‘My name!’ we are at once convinced of his amazing powers of acting. When we hear each articulate sound of his voice modulated to the sensations of Abel Drugger himself, we cannot but allow that the deceit is perfect and amazing. Yet I must own Mr. Garrick’s always repeating the action of breaking the bottle in the same manner, is rather an indolence in not having struck out something new in the many times he hath performed the part, although the stroke originally was characteristic and humorous. But it would be endless to enter into a particular criticism on his excellencies in a part in which he never was equalled, and in which his powerful invention is showed to an astonishing degree. (46)

488

151. Horace Walpole on Jonson 1762–76

(a) From Walpole’s section on Inigo Jones in volume ii of his four-volume Anecdotes of Painting in England (Strawberry Hill 1762–71). The Anecdotes are based on the papers of the antiquarian George Vertue. [Walpole has described the various masques with which Jones was concerned.] The harmony of these triumphs was a little interrupted by a war that broke out between the composers, Inigo and Ben; in which whoever was the aggressor, the turbulent temper of Johnson took care to be most in the wrong. Nothing exceeds the grossness of the language that he poured out, except the badness of the verses that were the vehicle. There he fully exerted all that brutal abuse which his cotemporaries were willing to think wit, because they were afraid of it; and which only seems to show the arrogance of the man, who presumed to satirize Jones and rival Shakespeare. With the latter indeed he had not the smallest pretensions to be compared, except in having sometimes writ absolute nonsense. Johnson translated the ancients, Shakespeare transfused their very soul into his writings. (ii, 149–50) (b) From an entry in a notebook dated 1771. Text from W.S. Lewis (ed.), Notes by Horace Walpole on Several Characters of Shakespeare (Farmington, Conn. 1940). [Walpole admires the way the grave-digger scene in Hamlet hurries on the catastrophe by rousing Hamlet’s indignation:] In this just light the skull of his father’s jester roused the indignation of Hamlet and egged him on to the justice he mediatated on his uncle; and thus that rejected scene hastened on the catastrophe of the tragedy, and more naturally than the most pompous exhortation would have done from the mouth of Horatio. A spark falling on combustible matter may light up a conflagration. A great master produces important events from a trifle naturally introduced. A piddling critic would waste his time in describing the torch with dignity that set fire to the combustion. Compare Ben Johnson’s Catiline with Hamlet. The former is all pedantry and bombast. (13–14) (c) From Walpole’s essay ‘Thoughts on Comedy’, first printed in his posthumous Works (1798). Mary Berry, the editor of that edition and Walpole’s literary executrix, heads the essay ‘Written in

490 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

1775 and 1776’, though some passages, as W.K. Wimsatt points out in his introduction to the essay in The Idea of Comedy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969), p. 195, refer to works written as late as 1786.

Our old comedies are very valuable from their variety of characters, and for preserving customs and manners; but they are more defective in plans and conduct than excellent in particular parts. Some are very pedantic, the greater part gross in language and humour, the latter of which is seldom true. Ben Jonson was more correct, but still more pedantic. Volpone is faulty in the moral, and too elevated in the dialogue: The Alchymist is his best play: The Silent Woman, formed on an improbable plan, is unnaturally loaded with learning. Beaumont and Fletcher are easier than Jonson, but less happy in executing a plan than in conceiving it. (ii, 315) ⋆⋆⋆ [Later in the essay Walpole returns briefly to Jonson.] As the great outlines of the passions are softened down by urbanity, fashionable follies usurp the place which belonged to criticism on characters; and when fashions are the object of ridicule, comedies soon grow obsolete and cease to be useful. Alchymy was the pursuit in vogue in the age of Ben Jonson; but being a temporary folly, satire on it is no longer a lesson. Fashions pushed to excess produce a like excess in the reproof; and comedies degenerate into farce and buffoonery, when follies are exaggerated in the representation. The traits in The Miser that exhibit his extreme avarice are within the operation of the passions: in The Alchymist an epidemic folly, grown obsolete, is food for a commentator, not for an audience. In fact, exaggeration is the fault of the author. If he be master enough of his talent to seize the precise truth of either passion or affectation, he will please more, though perhaps not at the first representation. Falstaff is a fictitious character, and would have been so had it existed in real life: yet his humour and his wit are so just, that they never have failed to charm all who are capable of tasting him in his own tongue. (ii, 319–20)

152. Samuel Rogers, Shakespeare and Jonson 1763

‘An ars natura sit perfectior’ (‘Whether art or nature be more perfect’), printed in The St. James’s Magazine (March 1763), ii. In 1764 Rogers included this poem in his Poems on Several Occasions, and part of it was printed in a review of the collection in The Critical Review (1764), xviii, 379–81. The title of the poem is from Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 408, and Hurd discusses Shakespeare and Jonson in his commentary on the line in No. 133, above. Rogers, rector of Chellington, in Bedfordshire, also published an annotated Bible (1765). Great Shakespeare, with genius disdaining all rules, Above the cold phlegm or the fripp’ry of schools, Appeal’d to the heart for success of his plays, And trusted to nature alone for the bays. Despairing of glory but what rose from art, Old Johnson applied to the head, not the heart. On the niceness of rules he founded his cause, And ravish’d from regular method applause. May we judge from the favours each poet has shar’d, Insipid is ART when with NATURE compar’d. (ii, 63)

492

153. David Erskine Baker on Jonson 1764

From The Companion to the Play-house (1764). The notes printed below are Baker’s, but the text is from Isaac Reed’s expanded and updated version of the Companion, Biographia Dramatica (1782). The Companion is in two volumes, the first devoted to ‘A Critical and Historical ACCOUNT of every Tragedy, Comedy, Farce, &c. in the English Language’ and the second to biographies of writers for the theatre. The entries on Jonson’s plays make extensive use of Langbaine, especially on Jonson’s sources. Reed in 1782 added notes from Whalley and Hurd to Every Man in…and Every Man out of his Humour and amplified Jonson’s biography and the list of his works. Baker (1730–67), grandson of Daniel Defoe, joined a company of strolling actors after the beginnings of a scientific career inspired by his father, Henry Baker, FRS, and in 1763 published the plays The Maid of Ossian and The Maid the Mistress; the latter, a translation from the Italian, was performed in Edinburgh in the same year. (a) On Bartholomew Fair. This play has an infinite deal of humour in it, and is, perhaps, the greatest assemblage of characters that ever was brought together within the compass of one single piece. Some of the characters, and indeed the greatest part of the humour in them, may be looked on as extremely low; but the intention of the author, in rendering them so, was to satirize the taste of the times he lived in (not greatly different from that of our own age), by pointing out, how exalted a degree of applause might be obtained by this light and low manner of writing, at the same time that his Catiline, a long-laboured and learned piece, although tolerably received, had not obtained that applause, which he, and every other judicious critic, was and must be convinced its merit had a title to. (ii, 27–8) (b) On Catiline.

This play has great merit, but is too declamatory for the present taste. (ii, 46) (c) On Every Man in his Humour.

This comedy is, perhaps, in point of the redundance of characters and power of language, not inferior to any of our author’s works. From the character of Kitely, it is pretty evident that Dr. Hoadly took the idea of his Strictland, in the Suspicious Husband, in which, however, he has fallen far short of the original. This play had lain dormant and

494 BEN JONSON

unemployed for many years, from its revival after the Restoration, till Mr. Garrick, in the year 1749, brought it once more on the stage, with some few alterations, and an additional scene of his own; ever since which time it has continued to be a stock play, and to be performed very frequently every season. Yet I much doubt, if in any future period this piece will ever appear to the advantage it did at that time; since, exclusive of Mr. Garrick’s own abilities in Kitely, and those of Messieurs Woodward and Shuter, in the respective parts of Capt. Bobadil and Master Stephen, there was scarcely any one character, throughout the whole, that could be conceived by an audience in the strong light that they were represented by each several performer: such is the prodigious advantage, with respect to an audience, of the conduct of a theatre lodged in the hands of a man, who, being himself a perfect master in the profession, is able to distinguish the peculiar abilities of each individual under him, and to adapt them to those characters in which they are, either by nature or acquirement, the best qualified to make a figure. (ii, 108) (d) On The New Inn.

Nothing, perhaps, can give a stronger idea of the self-opinion, haughtiness, and insolence of this writer, whose merit, great as it was, must be greatly eclipsed by those ill qualities, than his behaviour with regard to this play, which not succeeding according to the exalted idea he had himself formed of its worth, he published it with the following title-page, which I shall here transcribe at large: The New Inn; or, The Light Heart. A Comedy, never acted, but most negligently played by some of the King’s Servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others the King’s Subjects, 1629. Now at last set at Liberty to the Readers, his Majesty’s Servants and Subjects, to be judged. Nay, not satisfied with this general glance at their judgements in the title, he has annexed to the play an ode, in which he openly and insolently arraigns the public for want of taste, and threatens to quit the stage. Such was the resentment shewn by this opinionated genius on one single slight shewn to him by an audience from whom he had before received repeated favours. This ode, however, drew upon him an answer from Mr. Feltham, which could not fail of severely wounding a mind so susceptible of feeling, and so avaricious of praise, as Jonson’s. Nor do I hint this by way of casting any reflection on the memory of this truly great genius, whose merits in some respects are, and ever will remain, unequalled; but only as a hint, how greatly even the most exalted merit may degrade itself by too apparent a self-consciousness, and how vastly more amiable must have been the private characters of the modest Shakespeare and humble Spenser, who constantly mention themselves with the utmost humility, and others with the highest respect, than that of the overbearing Jonson; who, tender as he thus was as to any attacks made on himself, was nevertheless perpetually carping and cavilling at the works of others, the due commendations given to which his envious disposition would not permit him to hear with patience, nor acquiesce to with unreserve or candour. But such is the frailty of human nature, and such the errors which persons of great abilities are perhaps more epidemically liable to than others whose consciousness of defect abates and antidotes the pride of nature. (ii, 252–3) (e) On Volpone.

This comedy is joined by the critics with the Alchymist and Silent Woman, as the Chef d’Oeuvres of this celebrated poet; and, indeed, it is scarcely possible to conceive a piece more highly finished, both in point of language and character, than this comedy. The plot is perfectly original, and the circumstance of Volpone’s taking advantage of the

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 495

viciousness and depravity of the human mind in others, yet being himself made a dupe to the subtilty of his creature Mosca, is admirably conceived, and as inimitably executed. Yet, with all these perfections, this piece does and ever will share the same fate with the other dramatic works of its author, viz. that whatever delight and rapture they may give to the true critic in his closet, from the correctness exerted and the erudition displayed in them; yet, there still runs through them all an unempassioned coldness in the language, a laboured stiffness in the conduct, and a deficiency of incident and interest in the catastrophe, that robs the auditor in the representation of those pleasing, those unaccountable sensations he constantly receives from the flashes of nature, passion, and imagination, with which he is frequently struck, not only in the writings of the unequalled Shakspeare, but even in those of authors, whose fame, either for genius or accuracy, is by no means to be ranked with that of the bard under our present consideration. To write to the judgement, is one thing, to the feelings of the heart, another; and it will consequently be found, that the comedies of Cibber, Vanbrugh, and Congreve, will, on the Decies repetitæ,1 afford an increase of pleasure to the very same audiences, who would pass over even a second representation of any one of Jonson’s most celebrated pieces with coldness and indifference. (ii, 396) NOTE 1 ‘Tenth repetition’: cp. Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 365.

496

154. Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg on Jonson 1765

From the notes to a translation of Whalley’s introduction to his Jonson edition, included in von Gerstenberg’s German translation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, Die Braut (Copenhagen and Leipzig 1765). Von Gerstenberg (1737–1823) was an early German Shakespeare enthusiast: see Karl Schneider, ‘Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg als Verkünder Shakespeare’s’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (1922), lviii, 38–45. For Whalley’s introduction, see No. 144(a), above. (a) On Whalley’s criticism of Jonson for allowing the reference to poisoning to remain in the revised Every Man in his Humour. Perhaps this criticism might seem all too strange to many a reader, especially since in those wild times poisoning was also not unusual in England. Since, however, the author is dealing with a correct poet, who saw his best prospects in an intensely artistic imitation of manners and therefore must have known that here as well it was not enough to follow the truth but to follow the highest probability, I believe that Jonson himself would have conceded him the right here. (241) (b) On Hurd’s criticism that Jonson failed to see the difference between historical and dramatic discourses, and so thought his translations from the sources in Catiline would work as well in his play as they had done in the original. If this is true, as our author conceded to Mr. Hurt [sic], then Jonson is the vilest of all critics, which would be an obvious inconsistency. One needs only to read his Discoveries, to be completely convinced, that no-one could have a better grasp of the Aristotelian and Horatian principles of drama, especially in respect of the scale, unity and arrangement of the plot, than Jonson. Thus he distinguishes the historical plan from the dramatic as well as Mr. Hurt or Mr. Whalley: but when it came to the implementation, he let himself be captivated by his favourite idea, namely to surpass the ancients in their very excellences, and furnished a mass of passages from Salust and Cicero, not because he had an inclination to translation, or because he lacked the capacity to be original himself, but because he sought the honour of showing his fellow Englishmen how one could tailor these wonderful passages yet more wonderfully to the drama: a remarkable contest between genius, prejudice and rules, which I have not been able to pass over in silence, for all that it may be anything but rare. (249–50)

498

155. John Brown, Bartholomew Fair revised 1765

Letters by Brown to Garrick; text from The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, ed. James Boaden (1831–2), 2 vols. Dr John Brown (1715–66) wrote two tragedies, both staged by Garrick (Barbarossa, 1754, and Athelstan, 1756); Garrick also used him as a reader of new plays. In 1765 they corresponded about Brown’s revised Bartholomew Fair, which was not staged and which does not survive. The first two letters are dated by Boaden 1762, but, as Noyes points out, all three seem to have been written close together and the third is dated 1765 by a reference to Dr Johnson’s ‘Preface’ to his Shakespeare edition (Ben Jonson on the English Stage 1660– 1776, p. 243n). (a) To Garrick, 10 August As to the comedy, my good friend, I must brush up your memory a little. It was your own proposal (in your garden at Hampton,) that I should try my hand at it. Its comic merit, in point of character, is universally allowed to be of the first degree. In point of plan, it goes well upon the whole, till the third or fourth act, and then falls into nonsense and absurdity. This, I really think, I have removed; retaining, at the same time, every the least scrap of what is thinly scattered through the bad parts of it, such as might be worth preserving. This is all I pretend to: and as to the excellence of the other parts, it is generally allowed to be supreme. The Pig-woman certainly cannot be removed without spoiling the whole; for on her depend all the fine comic scenes between Busy, John Littlewit, and Justice Overdo; as well as some of Coke’s and Wasp. In short, she is the great connecting circumstance that binds the whole together. If the scene of her scolding be thought rather too coarse, it may easily be softened. But as to all these matters, I can only give my reasons: you are to judge of them. (i, 146) (b) To Garrick, 17 August ?1765.

[Brown complains that Garrick has not told him of some MP to whom he might inclose things to send to Garrick.] For want of this I have been forced to send to Mr. Gray, of Colchester, two packets which contain a new edition of ‘Bartholomew Fair.’ I pique myself more on rectifying this plan, than on any plan I ever struck out in my life. It is amazing to think how any writer could

500 BEN JONSON

do so well, and so ill, at the same time, as Ben Jonson did in this comedy. However, so far as I am a judge, there are admirable materials left, enough to make out a first-rate comedy after the trash is thrown out. But I will not anticipate. As to the little connecting scenes which I have added, I have made them as short as possible, because I know that my comic composition is nothing. As soon as you have well considered it, let me have your thoughts. I can furnish you with some songs that will be proper for the purpose: that which is inserted is the finest that ever Purcel composed; and if Miss Wright1 can act it as well as she can sing it (for both will be necessary), that very song will draw an audience. You will see that I have struck out four of the dramatis personæ. [Brown then refers to Garrick’s involvement in politics, and to his own, which has apparently led to some anger towards him. He concludes:] But I am like honest Justice Overdo, when he was set in the stocks, and defy Dame Fortune to hurt my mind, come what will. (i, 147–8) (c) To Garrick, 27 October 1765.

As to ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ my sentiment, in a word, is this: the comedy was, in its essentials, excellent, and that it wanted nothing but a plan. This I have attempted to give it; and I wait for your decision in this point… (i, 205) NOTE 1 An actress and singer; she married the composer Michael Arne in 1766.

156. Edward Capell, Jonson’s borrowings 1766

From Reflections on Originality in Authors: Being Remarks on A Letter to Mr Mason on the Marks of Imitation…With a Word or Two on The Characters of Ben Johnson and Pope (1766). Capell’s pamphlet replies to Hurd’s, which had, among other things, commended Jonson on his imitations (see No. 145, above). He corrects Hurd on the chronology of Shakespeare’s works and Jonson’s masques (Shakespeare cannot have borrowed from the latter), but he advocates caution in detecting imitation where there is only resemblance, and does not regard Jonson as a copier from Shakespeare (pp. 37–8). Capell (1713–81) published an edition of Mr. William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, in 1768; three volumes of notes to the plays, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, were printed in 1779–80 and published in 1783. The masques bulk large in Capell’s references to Jonson: he seems to have regarded them as debased products of courtly fashion, and responsible for Jonson’s literary authority in the latter part of his career (see the 1768 Shakespeare edition, i, 14; and his note on The Tempest, in Notes and Various Readings, ii, 68). For where versifiers are notoriously defective as to their creative powers, where they are themselves fond of proclaiming their own borrowings, there any party of theirs, which has a real Affinity to any thing to be met with in a preceding Work, is justly liable to the suspicion of being thence derived, consequently of being unoriginal. We have two Poets of this Stamp, who have been very open in their borrowings and Imitations. These are Ben Johnson and Pope: whom we may look upon as plunderers of Parnassus: Thieves of Renown, and pilferers of Fame.1 If we regard them in this view, though they seem to have been pretty much alike in the surliness of their tempers, and to have valued themselves both upon their learning and scholarship, yet there will however appear some difference between them. Johnson’s writings are one continued series of Imitation and allusion: where he not only literally translates the antients, many passages from whom are transfused into his performances, and chime in as regular and as if they were the product of his own invention; but he gleans as freely, and without reserve, from the moderns when they make for his purpose. Thus for instance in his Epithalamion, it is plain he has derived the manner and part of the matter also from Catullus and Spenser, from the latter of whom he has inserted a distick almost totidem verbis2 without having given the least hint of it. Again he is particularly

502 BEN JONSON

careful—verbum verbo reddere fidus interpres,3 when he pilfers from the antients; we have abundant proof of this in the lines which follow, ——————They say you tax’d The law, and lawyers; captaines; and the players By their particular names. Aut. it is not so. I us’d no name. My bookes have still been taught To spare the persons, and to speak the vices. [Poet., Epilogue, ll. 81–5] What an exact translation is the two last lines of these in Martial! Hunc novere modum nostri servare libelli Parcere personis dicere de vitijs.4 In a word, such a one was Johnson, that he seems to have made it his study to cull out others sentiments, and to place them in his works as from his own mint. This surely is an odd species of improvement from reading, and savours very little of Invention or Genius: It borders nearly upon, if it is not really plagiarism. For according to Thomasius—Qui fatetur per quem profecerit, reddit mutuum, qui non fatetur fur est.5 The only difference between the borrower and actual plagiary is but this—the one acknowledges, the other conceals his obligations. In this respect Johnson’s character and Pope’s seem to tally: but Johnson’s is different from his in another respect, and that is in his every where abounding with allusions, which is a genteeler species of borrowing. One or two will serve as specimen. In the Alchemist, Act 1. Sc. 2. Face is persuading Dapper, at all events, to see the Queen of Faerie: It will be somewhat hard to compasse: but However see her. You are made, believe it, If you can see her. Her Grace is a lone woman And very rich, and if she take a phantsye She will do strange things. See her at any hand. ’Slid she may chance to leave you all she has! [1.2.153–8] He alludes here to a vulgar notion prevalent in his own time, but forgotten now. I have heard it often, says Sir John Harington,6 among the simpler sort, that he that can please the Queene of Faeries shall never want while he lives. In the next Scene Face says to Drugger —no gold about thee? Dru. Yes I have a Portague, I ha’ kept this half yeere. [1.3.87] Holinshead in his Description of Britaine, mentions the Portague as a Piece very solemnly kept of dyvers.7 This Custom we are sure from hence continued in his time. But a reader of Johnson is continually teized with these. Drugger in this same Scene is said to be —a neat, spruce, honest fellow, and no Goldsmith. A quaint distinction, and no Goldsmith! —It means possibly that he had not the Chrysosperme, i.e. that he had not the Philosopher’s stone. It is however by no means obvious that this is the real meaning of this part of his character; and therefore it must remain hardly intelligible to the generality of his readers. Thus much for Johnson, considered as a Maker, and who as such has very poor pretensions to the high place he holds among the English Bards, as there is no original manner to distinguish him, and the tedious sameness visible in his plots indicates a defect of Genius. (63–6)

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 503

NOTES 1 Edward Young, Love of Fame, The Universal Passion, iii, l. 88: The Complete Works in Poetry and Prose, ed. James Nichols (1854), i, 364. 2 ‘In just as many words’. 3 ‘To render word for word as a slavish translator’: Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 133. 4 ‘This measure my books learn to keep, to spare the person, to denounce the vice’: Martial 10.33.9–10. 5 ‘The man who confesses from whom he has borrowed repays the debt, the man who does not confess is a thief.’ Capell gives the reference, ‘De Plagio Literario, S. 66’. 6 In the notes to his translation of Ariosto, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591), p. 373. 7 The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland (1577), Part i, fol. 117v.

504

157. Jonson strong without passion 1767

From The Rational Rosciad (1767), a poem about the stage, dramatic writers, and actors, by ‘F—B—L—’. The poet asks the Muses for ‘Churchill’s strength, without his spite’ (p. 3) and clearly hopes to emulate the success of The Rosciad (see No. 149, above). The results are generally lame, though this measured praise of Jonson goes a little beyond the conventional. There is an unflattering reference to Smith as Kitely on p. 28. JOHNSON to future times his fame may trust, Who is tho’ seldom striking, always just. Tho’ cool, correct, tho’ modest, yet severe. Strong without passion, without dulness clear; Humorous with elegance, jocose with ease, Sublime to charm, satirical to please; SHAKESPEAR’s strong genius ever unconfin’d, Darts on the soul, and captivates the mind; While JOHNSON, by more regular essays, Attacks the dangerous avenues of praise. (5–6)

506

158. James Beattie, Jonson’s misuse of learning 1769

From ‘Remarks on the Utility of Classical Learning’, which Beattie says was written in 1769; first printed in his Essays (Edinburgh 1776). Beattie (1735–1803) was for many years Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at Marischal College, Aberdeen; his Essay on Truth (1770), attacking Hume and the sceptics, gained him a considerable contemporary reputation. The discussion of Catiline below is obviously inspired by Hurd’s in his commentary on Horace (see No. 133, above). Beattie goes on after the passage printed here to concede that the instance of Shakespeare ‘may have induced some persons to think unfavourably of the influence of learning upon genius’, but argues that such a conclusion should not be reached on the basis of one instance, especially when the instance ‘is allowed to be extraordinary, and almost supernatural’ (p. 529). No person who understands Greek and Latin will ever admit, that these languages can be an incumbrance to the mind. And perhaps it would be difficult to prove, even by a single instance, that genius was ever hurt by learning. Ben Johnson’s misfortune was, not that he knew too much, but that he could not make a proper use of his knowledge; a misfortune, which arose rather from a defect of genius or taste, than from a superabundance of erudition. With the same genius, and less learning, he would probably have made a worse figure. —His play of Catiline is an ill-digested collection of facts and passages from Sallust. Was it his knowledge of Greek and Latin that prevented his making a better choice? To comprehend every thing the historian has recorded of that incendiary, it is not requisite that one should be a great scholar. By looking into Rose’s translation, any man who understands English may make himself master of the whole narrative in half a day. It was Johnson’s want of taste, that made him transfer from the history to the play some passages and facts that suit not the genius of dramatic writing: it was want of taste, that made him dispose his materials according to the historical arrangement; which, however favourable to calm information, is not calculated for working those effects on the passions and fancy, which it is the aim of tragedy to produce. It was the same want of taste, that made him, out of a rigid attachment to historical truth, lengthen his piece with supernumerary events inconsistent with the unity of design, and not subservient to the catastrophe; and it was doubtless owing to want of invention, that he confined himself so strictly to the letter of the story. Had he recollected the advice of Horace, (of which he could not be ignorant, as he translated the whole poem into English verse), he must have avoided some of these faults:

508 BEN JONSON

[Quotes Horace, Ars Poetica, ll. 131–5, referring the reader in a note to ‘Dr. Hurd’s elegant commentary and notes’.] A little more learning, therefore, or rather a more seasonable application of what he had, would have been of great use to the author on this occasion. (526–8)

159. Elizabeth Montague, Jonson and Shakespeare 1769, 1770

Mrs Elizabeth Montague (1720–1800) was a leading literary hostess. (a) From An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769), an answer to Voltaire’s attack on Shakespeare. Shakespear, in the dark shades of Gothic barbarism, had no resources but in the very phantoms that walked the night of ignorance and superstition: or in touching the latent passions of civil rage and discord; sure to please best his fierce and barbarous audience, when he raised the bloody ghost, or reared the warlike standard. His choice of these subjects was judicious, if we consider the times in which he lived; his management of them so masterly, that he will be admired in all times. In the same age, Ben. Johnson, more proud of his learning than confident of his genius, was desirous to give a metaphysical air to his compositions. He composed many pieces of the allegorical kind, established on the Grecian mythology, and rendered his play-house a perfect pantheon. —Shakespear disdained these quaint devices; an admirable judge of human nature, with a capacity most extensive, and an invention most happy, he contented himself with giving dramatic manners to history, sublimity and its appropriated powers and charms to fiction; and in both these arts he is unequalled. —The Catiline and Sejanus of Johnson are cold, crude, heavy pieces; turgid where they should be great; bombast where they should be sublime; the sentiments extravagant; the manners exaggerated; and the whole undramatically conducted by long senatorial speeches, and flat plagiarisms from Tacitus and Sallust. Such of this author’s pieces as he boasts to be grounded on antiquity and solid learning, and to lay hold on removed mysteries [Hym., ll. 16, 18–19], have neither the majesty of Shakespear’s serious fables, nor the pleasing sportfulness and poetical imagination of his fairy tales. (150–2) (b) From a letter to Garrick, dated 31 May 1770. Text from The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, ed. James Boaden (1831–2), 2 vols. Boaden added a note to this letter lamenting that Mrs Montague had not acknowledged that Kitely was ‘finely written’ by Jonson as well as finely acted by Garrick, and that ‘as far as comparison will lie between comedy and tragedy, the scene of Kitely and Cash is upon a par with that of King John and Hubert’ (p. 386).

510 BEN JONSON

Mrs Montagu is a little jealous for poor Shakspeare; for if Mr. Garrick often acts Kitely, Ben Jonson, will eclipse his fame. All the labours of the critics can do nothing by the dead letter of criticism against the living force of Mr. Garrick’s representation. King Lear in his madness, or Macbeth led by air-drawn daggers, cannot kill what Mr Garrick has rendered immortal. Kitely will never sink into oblivion. Fie upon Mr. Garrick! he alone could raise a rival to Shakespeare. The epilogue was incomparable, and Mrs. M.tasted it with unmixed delight. She has heard from Lord and Lady Chatham lately, and they are still regretting that they were deprived of the great pleasure they had promised themselves from their incomparable Kitely. (i, 385–6)

160. Francis Gentleman, Jonson a bad writer 1770

From The Dramatic Censor (1770), 2 vols. In spite of his strictures here, Gentleman adapted Sejanus (see No. 137, above), used The Alchemist as the basis for his farce The Tobacconist (see No. 162, below) and for The Pantheonites (1773), and drew on Epicoene for his farce The Coxcombs (1771). BEN JONSON, though ranked so high in literary fame, does not appear to us deserving of so honourable a station. His tragedies are the most stiff, uncouth, laborious, unaffecting, productions we know, spun out to an intolerable length, by tedious, unessential, declamatory passages, translated from the classics; three of his comedies have justly received the stamp of general approbation; VOLPONE, SILENT WOMAN, and EVERY MAN in his HUMOUR; yet even in these nature seems rather carricatur’d, and there are many blamable intrusions upon delicacy of idea and expression, the remainder of his works might have dubbed any man, less lucky, with the title of a bad writer, and we are perfectly of opinion that naming him with his great cotemporary is pairing authors as poulterers do rabbits, a fat and a lean one. (ii, 461)

512

161. Charles Jenner, Sir Charles Beville at The Alchemist 1770

From the novel The Placid Man: Or, Memoirs of Sir Charles Beville (1770), 2 vols. Text from the second edition (1773), in which Jenner’s name appeared for the first time. Jenner (1736–74) was a clergyman; he published some volumes of poems, including Town Eclogues (1772) in which a country vicar come up to town despairs of the taste for pageants and ‘flimsy farces’ on stage and longs to return to commonsense judgements and to ‘Shakespear and old Ben’ (pp. 3–4) Beville is the rival of the immensely wealthy and entirely mercenary Sir Isaac Rupee for the hand of Miss Clayton, whose mother Lady Clayton favours Sir Isaac’s suit. Whilst he was entertaining Miss Clayton with an account of the particular manner in which he had become acquainted with old Mr. Barker, Sir Isaac found something or other to say to Lady Clayton, so giving a nod with his head at Sir Charles, as much as to say, ‘It will be my turn when we get into Suffolk,’ he very contentedly seated himself behind her, and they settled who was who, till the curtain drew up. The play was The Alchemist. ‘It is a stupid play,’ said Lady Clayton as the curtain drew up; ‘it is so old-fashioned,’ and ‘damned low,’ said Sir Isaac. In the third scene, however, they both laughed immoderately at Abel Drugger. ‘Excellent!’ said Sir Isaac. ‘Inimitable!’ said Lady Clayton. ‘There’s some humour in this character,’ said Sir Isaac. ‘Pray, Sir,’ said Sir Charles, ‘don’t you think the humour lies a good deal in seeing Mr. Garrick in that old waistcoat and wig, and that green apron?’ ‘Why, Sir,’ said Sir Isaac, ‘if it had not been a top character, Mr. Garrick would not have chosen it.’ ‘Now I think,’ said Miss Clayton, ‘that he rather chose it, on purpose to shew that he could delight one with any thing; and if he had taken Dapper or Ananias, we should have been as well pleased with them.’ Sir Charles smiled. Sir Isaac did not dare to contradict her; Lady Clayton did not think it worth while; and so the argument dropped. In the second act Sir Charles laughed heartily at some strokes in the character of Sir Epicure Mammon: possibly Sir Isaac thought he was drawing some parallel. ‘You seem, Sir,’ said he, ‘to be much taken with this part; I cannot see where the great humour lies in cheating a gentleman in so barefaced a manner.’ ‘My dear Sir,’ replied Sir Charles, ‘in these cases we must feel, not reason; humour is a thing of so delicate a nature, that if it is not felt, it

514 BEN JONSON

is impossible to point it out.’ Sir Isaac was answered; an argument above the comprehension of your antagonist, is just as good as a convincing one. ‘You see, Sir,’ said Sir Charles, when they came to the scene where Mammon takes so much pains to convince Surly, ‘that all the humour does not lie in their cheating him, but in the great pains which he takes to cheat himself: and if we look attentively into human nature, we shall find that humour is not yet out of date.’ Sir Isaac took a pinch of snuff. ‘Pray, Sir Charles,’ said Miss Clayton, after the act was over, ‘don’t you think the poet has crowded into his play, with some degree of affectation, rather more of the science which he meant to ridicule than was necessary?’ ‘Excellently well said, upon my soul,’ cried Sir Isaac, and laughed very loud; ‘what say you to that, Sir Charles?’ ‘Why, Madam,’ replied Sir Charles, ‘in this respect Lady Clayton’s observation upon this play is very just, it is old-fashioned; that is to say, the science upon which the ridicule is turned, and which, at that time of day, had turned the heads of half the studious men in the nation, is now entirely exploded; and so the pains which the poet takes to expose the principles of the science lose great part of their effect to us, because they appear needless. But perhaps, as you very accurately observe, there may be a degree of affectation in it; Ben Johnson was a good scholar, and a man of great reading, it was not therefore to be wondered at, in an age when such people were scarce, that he was willing to seize every opportunity of shewing his knowledge, sometimes even at the expence of his judgment. It must be entirely owing to this, that in the second scene of this act he has made Sir Epicure Mammon, in expressing his intended luxury, have recourse to all the things in use amongst the luxurious part of the Romans; as I dare say a Lord-mayor’s feast, even in his time, would have furnished him with dishes which would have conveyed much higher ideas of luxury and epicurism to his audience, than the paps of a fat pregnant sow dressed with a poignant sauce, or the tongues of dormice and camels heels; but then he would have lost the opportunity of letting you know what was Apicius’s diet against the epilepsy.’ ‘Who was Apicius?’ said Sir Isaac. ‘Vy,’ said Lady Clayton, who was roused by the mention of a Lord-mayor’s feast, ‘he is one of the people in that book that Sir Harry is so fond of, because it was written by a lord, Dialogues of the Dead;1 he, and another man with a hard name, talk all about eating.’ ‘Very true, Madam,’ said Sir Charles. Miss Clayton blushed, and inquiring who a lady was in the opposite stage-box, put an end to the criticism. ‘What are these; taylors?’ said Lady Clayton, when the third act opened with Tribulation and Ananias. ‘Quakers,’ said Sir Isaac. —When they came to the next scene, where Subtle is enumerating the art and absurdities of the Puritans, ‘You see,’ said Sir Charles, ‘that Mr. Foote was not the first person who made use of the stage to ridicule the vice or absurdity of a religious sect; for his Minor cannot expose the hypocrisy and enthusiasm of the Methodists more, than this play and the Bartholomew Fair of the same author do those of the Puritans.’ ‘I think it is a shame though,’ said Sir Isaac; ‘such things ought to be talked of no where but at church.’ ‘Pray, Sir,’ said Sir Charles, ‘do not you think that the stage as well as the pulpit may be made to support the cause of virtue? If so, why is not one vice the object of its censure as well as another? For my own part, I acknowledge I cannot see why hypocrisy and enthusiasm are to be spared a bit more than drunkenness or lying.’ Sir Isaac took a pinch of snuff. The fourth act passed without much notice till they came to the last scene; which Sir Charles observed was the most exquisite piece of satire that ever was written. ‘Why it is nothing,’ said lady Clayton, ‘but a parcel of people quarrelling.’ ‘Very true, Madam,’ replied he, ‘and you see they are all turned upon one poor man; and therein lies the depth of the satire. All the people, who are cheated by Subtle and Face, are joined together against Surly, who would open their eyes; the common fate of those who

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 515

will give advice, and be wiser than their neighbours. You see Madam, though he only tells them how egregiously they are imposed upon, and begs leave only to be their best friend, and set them right, the villains have the address to give every man a separate cause to quarrel with him, till they drive him out of doors.’ ‘There is nothing easier,’ said Miss Clayton, ‘than for artful people to impose upon simple ones, except it is to persuade them to impose upon themselves.’ The denouement in the fifth act afforded them some diversion, though Miss Clayton observed, and Sir Charles could not but acknowledge, that the poet had been deficient in point of poetical justice in the conclusion, for Face, the chief contriver of all the villainy, is pardoned, and taken into favour by his master, who, by the bye, is taken in to make one in the plot, as a reward for his helping him, by means of a trick, to a foolish wife, whilst all the injured parties are left without redress. But Ben Johnson was not so excellent in the management of his plots, as of his incidents and dialogue. —Miss Clayton thanked Sir Charles for having made her enter more into the spirit of the play than ever she had done before. Lady Clayton said, that it was called a very fine play; but it was too old for her: and Sir Isaac persisted in his opinion, that it was damned low. —Sir Charles asked Lady Clayton, how long Sir Harry staid in town; and said he would do himself the honour of waiting on him; to which she replied with rather more glee than delicacy, ‘Aye, but ve go to-morrow morning.’ Sir Charles bowed, sighed, said he was very sorry, in which he certainly spoke truth, and having handed Miss Clayton to her coach, took a melancholy leave, went home in low spirits, supped alone, and retired to rest with that kind of sensation which has a mixture of pleasure and pain. (ii, 38–45) NOTE 1 By George, Lord Lyttleton; first published in 1760.

516

162. Francis Gentleman’s The Tobacconist 1770–1

This farce, a ‘Comedy of Two Acts Altered from Ben Johnson’, was first published, and possibly first performed, in Edinburgh in 1760. It consists of exchanges between Drugger, Subtle, Face, and Sir Epicure Mammon, partly modernized from the original and partly topical, with the addition of the up-to-date gulls Headlong and Miss Rantipole. It was first performed in London at the Haymarket Theatre on 15 October 1770, and frequently thereafter. There was a ferocious attack on the farce in The London Evening Post for 13–16 October 1770, concentrating on the ‘obsolete humour and low buffoonery’ Gentleman had introduced. (a) Prologue, ‘Written and spoken by Mr. GENTLEMAN’; text from The London Chronicle, 16–18 July 1771 (it appears with an extract from the first scene). BEN JOHNSON’S name, in ev’ry ear of taste, Must with respect and countenance be grac’d; No pen the lines of Nature better drew, No wit or satire ever higher flew; An early pillar of the English stage, His pieces were true pictures of the age; Time-worn they feel impair—yet still must please, Nervous and just, though void of modern ease. Fashions, in characters as well as cloaths, Change, tho’ less oft, as wav’ring fancy flows; Witches and fairies with their midnight train, No longer revel on the blasted plain; Now ev’ry simpleton of Britain’s isle, At such a fraud as Alchymy would smile; Yet being only chang’d in name and shapes, Scare one in ten the gilded bait escapes. Haste to the Hall, where law is sold like ware, How many long rob’d Alchymists ply there; What hopes to gudgeon clients they unfold, While empty quibbles turn to solid gold; See swarming quacks! —so public folly wills, Convert to gold their health destroying pills.

518 BEN JONSON

Change Alley view—that scene of transmutation, That base alchemic bubble of the nation; See beauty’s self resign its brightest charms And turn to gold in age’s frozen arms. Search all the world, examine ev’ry part; You’ll find each man an Alchymist at heart: In ev’ry clime we find, if truth be told, The universal Deity is gold. Whate’er of merit you perceive this night, Grant your old Bard as his undoubted right; My brain has laboured—feebly I confess, Only to furnish a more modern dress. My weak endeavours let your candor raise, They hope indulgence, though they reach not praise. (61) (b) Notice in The London Chronicle, 13–16 July 1771. THEATRICAL INTELLIGENCE.

The Tobacconist (acted with great applause at Mr. Foote’s Theatre last night) is founded on the plot of Ben Johnson’s Alchymist, several of the characters being retained, which, with the addition of two new ones, form the Dramatis Personæ of the piece. —Mr. Gentleman, who altered this comedy, seems principally to have designed to preserve the satire and ridicule of the Alchymist, but to lop off the superfluous characters, and to let it appear without its unintelligible, pedantic language, and that quaintness of expression which peculiarly distinguishes the work of Ben Johnson. —He has succeeded tolerably well; the modern dress and familiarized diction make the piece infinitely more palatable to the present frequenters of the Theatre, —those who admire Mr. Weston are much indebted to Mr. Gentleman, for affording him an opportunity of still farther exerting his abilities. Abel Drugger is certainly one of the best parts Mr. Weston plays, and the applause so liberally bestowed on him last night, justifies this assertion. The two new characters, are Miss Rantipole, a gay, giddy young Lady of fortune, supported with peculiar spirit by Mrs. Didier, and Headlong, a bruising, boxing blade, judiciously played by Mr. Vandermere. The other parts were done justice to by the several performers, and the whole met with repeated shouts of approbation. Considered merely as an after-piece, the Tobacconist has every necessary merit for the Stage, and is extremely laughable and entertaining. (55) (c) Review in The London Magazine, July 1771, in the section ‘The British Theatre’ (extracts from the farce follow the quoted passage). …we now turn to the Tobacconist, a farce of two acts, altered from Ben Johnson’s Alchymist by Mr. Gentleman, a very sensible, and we are told, a very worthy man, in Mr. Foote’s company of Comedians. It has been long a fashion to celebrate Ben Johnson as an admirable comic Writer, though if we examine his pieces with the smallest degree of critical attention, we shall find their merit to consist wholly in the strength and variety of his characters. His fables are most lamentably uninteresting; his incidents heavy and

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 519

unnatural; and his catastrophes wretchedly uninstructive. The comedy of the Alchymist, derived its entire support on the stage from the character of Abel Drugger, which Mr. Garrick worked into a miracle of simplicity, and in which he instructed Mr. Weston with a success that answered his warmest expectations. To give Mr. Weston a more frequent opportunity of appearing in this part, Mr. Gentleman tells us, was the chief end he proposed to himself in the present alteration; and he also tells us, that he has retained but little of the original, besides the general idea of alchymy, and Abel Drugger; even to Abel Drugger he has made some additions, and introduced two new characters, Miss Rantipole and Headlong, which appear happily enough sketched, and gave us so much satisfaction, that we have extracted Headlong’s whole character for the entertainment of our readers. (361–2)

520

163. George Colman’s revival of Volpone 1771

The revival took place at Covent Garden on 26 November. (a) Unsigned review in The Theatrical Review, November 1771. The early parts of the review are indebted to the entry on Volpone in The Companion to the Play-house (No. 153, above). BEN JONSON, as a Dramatic Writer, seems, by some, to have been unjustly placed in Competition with the immortal Shakespear. The number of his Pieces is, indeed, very considerable, and some of them deserve a very high rank in literary Fame; but his Comedies are infinitely superior to his Tragedies. Of the former his Alchymist; Every Man in his Humour; Epicæne, or the Silent Woman; and Volpone, or the Fox, are the most capital, and, indeed, the only ones now in possession of the Stage. Of these Volpone has been generally considered as the principal, in point of Merit; and certain it is, that with respect to Character and Language, it is very highly finished. The Plot is perfectly original; in the Conduct of which, the Author has discovered great Erudition and Correctness. The circumstance of Volpone’s taking advantage of the depravity of human Nature in others, yet suffering himself to be duped and over-reached by the subtility of Mosca, (a Creature of his own raising) is happily imagined, and executed in a very masterly manner. But, with all these perfections, it seems better calculated to afford pleasure in the Closet, than on the Stage, as there is an evident deficiency of incident, and interest in the Catastrophe, which renders it incapable of giving that satisfaction in the Representation, it undoubtedly must afford on a perusal. It is only for real Genius to taste that redundance of inexpressible beauties, which appears through the whole, and which must render it, as Hamlet says, ‘Caviare to the Multitude’ —After all, though the Piece before us will not produce those pleasing sensations on the Stage, arising from the Flashes of Nature, Passion and Genius which the Plays of Shakespear never fail to bestow, the present lamentable dearth of good Comic Writers, will sufficiently justify the revival of it. And if instances of this Nature were more frequent, they, probably, might give a check to the temporary rage of false taste, which has had its foundation in managerial Avarice, and which has betrayed the ignorant and injudicious into a foolish admiration of the absurd extravagance of Pantomimes, Jubilees, and ridiculous Raree-show Pageantries. But as these innovations cannot long stand the brunt of critical indignation, it is to be hoped, the time is at hand, when reason and common

522 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

sense will again re-assume their empire, so unjustly usurped by the representatives of the disordered Inhabitants of Bedlam. [Discusses objections to the revivals of old plays, quoting George Colman’s Critical Reflections on the Old English Dramatic Writers (1671) on the ephemeral appeal of some recent dramatic characters and on the timeless interest of some of the older ones.] ⋆⋆⋆ The truth of the above remarks, is too evident to be disputed, and is sufficiently verified in the instance of the Piece now before us; in which, most of the Characters are perfect originals, all set forth in the strongest colours, and apparent likenesses of many well known existents in real life. As this Comedy is now represented, most of the obsolete Passages, and many blameable intrusions upon delicacy of idea, and expression in the original, are sensibly omitted, the latter being unsuitable to the professed chastity of the present age; and some Scenes are transposed, and others omitted as superfluous, by which judicious alteration, the appearance of new Characters, and the quicker succession of incidents, contributes more agreeably to heighten and promote the progress of the main design—The Scene is laid at Venice; and it was first played in the year 1605, the principal Characters being performed by those old celebrated Players, Burbadge, Hemings and Condel. [Discusses the three performers’ links with Shakespeare.] ⋆⋆⋆ With respect to the Representation of this Play, the principal Characters, viz. Volpone, Mosca, Voltore, Corvino, Corbachio, and Bonario, are well performed by Messrs. Smith, Bensley, Hull, Clarke, Shuter, and Wroughton, so well, that they appear to fill the Author’s Ideas very pleasingly and very justly, except, that Mr. Hull, who is generally natural and correct in his playing, rather over-acts his Part in the capacity of the Advocate, in the Scenes before the Avocatori, in the Senate. With respect to Mr. Shuter, in the Character of Corbachio, we are glad to remark, that his Performance throughout, is chaste and attentively correct, without the least taint of that over-strained luxuriancy of humour, he too frequently displays, and which almost perpetually runs into buffoonery. His strokes of Bye play, of endeavouring to hasten the death of Volpone, (whom he supposes to be sick, and near his end, on the Couch) by pressing his stomach with his cane, while Mosca is engaged with Voltore, are well imagined, when we consider, that in this Character, Nature is rather caricatured, which is the general, tho’ only fault of this Author, in his Comic Writings. In this particular, without naming many others, Jonson is greatly inferior to Shakespear, the latter having excelled all the ancients and moderns, in the knowledge of human Nature, and, therefore, it is, that all his Characters are naturally drawn, as is conspicuous by the delicate propriety of his Sentiment and Expression. In the delineation of the passions also, he is superior to all other Writers. In short, it is difficult to say, in what Part he excells most; whether in moulding every passion to peculiarity of Character, in discovering the Sentiments that proceed from various tones of passion, or in expressing properly every different sentiment; he never disgusts with general declamation and unmeaning words, too common in other writers. His sentiments are adjusted, with the

BEN JONSON 523

greatest propriety, to the peculiar Character and Circumstances of the Speaker; and the propriety is not less perfect between his Sentiments, and his Diction, as will be evident to every observer of taste, upon comparing him with other writers in similar passages. This is a rare and wonderful faculty, and of the greatest importance in a dramatic Author; and it is this faculty which makes him surpass all other Writers in the Comic, as well as Tragic vein. —We are aware, that it may be urged, upon some occasions, he falls greatly below himself, in those Scenes where passion enters not; by endeavouring, in this case, to raise his Dialogue above the style of ordinary conversation, he undoubtedly sometimes deviates into intricate thought and obscure expression: and sometimes, to throw his language out of the familiar, he employs rhyme. But may it not in some measure excuse Shakespear, we shall not say his Works, that he had no pattern in his own, or in any living Language of Dialogue fitted for the Theatre? At the same time, it ought not to escape observation, that the stream clears in its progress, and that in his latter Plays he has attained the purity and perfection of Dialogue: an observation that, with greater certainty than tradition, will direct the arrangement of his Plays, in the order of time. This ought to be considered by those who exaggerate every blemish, that is discovered in the finest Genius for the Drama, the world ever enjoyed. They ought also, for their own sake, to consider, that it is easier to discover his blemishes which lie generally at the surface, than his beauties, which cannot be truly relished, but by those who dive deeply into human Nature. —Thus much we thought necessary to observe in this place, in opposition to those who have ranked Ben Jonson upon an equal footing with Shakespear as a Dramatic Writer. (i, 226–32) (b) From James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (1825). Boaden is describing the state of the theatre in London at the time of Kemble’s arrival there (1783). Robert Bensley acted Mosca in the 1771–2 Covent Garden Volpone and in the 1783 Haymarket revival. William Parsons, who specialized in playing old men, regularly took the part of Corbaccio in the period. In that amazing production of dramatic science, the Fox, Mr. Bensley gave to the fine fly, the parasite Mosca, what no other actor in my time could pretend to give, and seemed in truth, like the character, to come back to us from a former age. He spoke Ben Jonson’s language, as if he had never been accustomed to a lighter and less energetic diction, and with the Volpone of Palmer and the Corbaccio of Parsons, presented a feast to the visitors of Colman’s theatre, which has seldom been equalled, and will I believe never be surpassed. (57) ⋆⋆⋆ [From the section on Parsons.] I cannot pursue him through the long list of parts which he retained; (for whatever he once touched became his property during life;) but I will just notice a few of his most prominent performances, as they start up in my memory. His Foresight1 was a perfect thing; and his Corbaccio in the Fox astonished and delighted the best judges in the art. His deafness in this wretched cormorant was truth itself—his eager expectation of Volpone’s decease—his villanous temptations of Mosca, and his miserable delight at every succeeding invention of the Parasite, were above all praise. Nor was his expression confined to his face, amply as the features did their office; but every passion circulated in

524 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

him to the extremities, and spoke in the motion of his feet or the more striking intelligence of his hands: the latter became the claws of a harpy, when they crawled over the parchment, which blasted all his hopes, by shewing that Mosca had become the heir of Volpone, instead of himself. (62) NOTE 1 In Congreve’s Love for Love.

164. Doubts on Jonson and the old dramatists 1772

‘Jeremy Collier’ had begun writing letters to The General Evening Post attacking judgements in the paper’s ‘Theatrical Review’ section in the number for 7–9 November 1771. He was applauded soon after in a letter from ‘Longinus’ (9–12 November) and letters over the two pen-names appeared, generally in alternate numbers, for some months. All three items appear in the ‘Postscript’ section of the paper. (a) From a letter by ‘Longinus’ in The General Evening Post, 4–7 January 1772. [The writer has complained that critics advocate an extravagance in plays which popular taste will not tolerate.] If the extravagancies, however, of Ben Johnson, or the brilliancy of Congreve, throw all the writers of the present period at the mortifying distance we are assured they do, whence comes it that they do not maintain their superiority on the stage, and bring crouded audiences when they are represented in our Theatres? The town must be egregiously blind, or shamefully unjust, if these all-be-praised pieces are possessed of such remarkable excellences; for there is not at this moment a single play of Ben Johnson’s which keeps its theatrical ground by the mere force of its own strength; nor a comedy of Congreve’s which is not usually exhibited to empty boxes. Indeed we sometimes see the Alchymist and Every Man in his Humour performed, but we do not see them out of compliment to the author; our curiosity is excited wholly by the merit of some particular actors, who have raked these heterogeous jumbles from obscurity, and stamped them with the seal of universal admiration. When these actors, however, shall cease to be, the mighty Ben must immediately sink into his former oblivion; and instead of supposing him any longer one of the first pillars which supports the stage, we shall be convinced that he has derived his whole support from the Theatre. (b) ‘Jeremy Collier’, letter to The General Evening Post, 1–4 February 1772. When the Managers of our Theatres undertake the revival of any old plays which have been long discontinued in the acting list of performances, they should always be extremely cautious to revive such only as manifestly tend to answer the great purposes of

526 BEN JONSON

the drama, and have at least no positive appearance of corrupting the morale of the people. Two plays have been revived this season, the one Volpone, a comedy by Ben Johnson, at Covent-garden house; the other Timon of Athens, a tragedy altered from Shakespeare, at Drury-lane; yet though a considerable share of attention has been bestowed upon the exhibition of these pieces, there is something in both so radically wrong, so obviously repugnant to common sense, that I am fully persuaded they must speedily return to the oblivion from which they were called forth by the industry of our Managers. The comedy of Volpone, like the generality of its author’s works, is founded upon a harsh, unnatural plan, crude in the idea, and odious in the execution; the hero, who is constantly pretending to be at the point of death, and wringing magnificent presents from those whose avarice he plays upon, with the hope of large legacies, ‘out-herods Herod’ beyond all degree of credibility; the very rage for wealth, which constitutes the principal characteristic of all his dupes, is the very reason why it would be utterly impossible to succeed in his artifices; an avaricious rascal may for once or twice be imposed upon by a villain of superior capacity, and in the language of the vulgar, ‘throw away a whiting in expectation of a cod;’ but to continue for years the unsuspecting tool of fraud, to be incessantly giving, through a view only of obtaining; and always to exchange sterling gold for unsubstantial promises; a conduct of this kind is to invert the immediate nature of avarice, to contradict the universal experience of mankind, and to sacrifice conviction itself at the grossest altar of absurdity. Those who are even but superficially read in the great volume of human life know very well that men in general form an opinion of others by the secret standard of their own hearts: hence he who does not mean to deceive is seldom apprehensive of deceit; and, intending no mischief, suspects no intentions of mischief in his acquaintance; whereas the wily villain, on the contrary, lives in perpetual fear of suffering by fraud, because he is perpetually meditating frauds himself upon society. The thief, according to the just observation of Shakespeare, considers every bush an officer; of consequence the cormorants, who sought to prey upon the possessions of Volpone, measuring the minds of other men by their own, would never have borne disappointment after disappointment patiently, especially where each was sensible he had a number of rivals, and saw these rivals also openly caressed before his face, though private assurances were given to him that every competitor for Volpone’s favour should be plundered to advance his particular emolument. When men betray others, we have no reason to expect that they will preserve good faith with us. An honest man will not commit a rascality to serve the dearest friend; and a fool only can believe that he will. But even admitting, in opposition to every thing which I have here advanced, that it is possible for all these excessively keen people to be a pack of the grossest idiots, still let me ask if the comedy of Volpone is an entertaining play upon the whole? or whether it is the least calculated to give a salutary lesson to the public? Many things may be natural enough in real life, which on the stage are highly improper for representation. This is the case in the piece before us, where one of the legacy-hunters contends to prostitute his wife to the arch impostor, and even drags her into the presence of the audience for the express purpose of violation. All these things are disgusting to reason, and offensive to decency; yet after enduring them through five tedious acts, the curtain falls without yielding as many minutes amusement, or affording a single sentiment of instruction. Villains indeed are punished but their villainies are applauded as instances of the greatest good sense, and universal

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 527

applause is actually demanded for those who are really held out as the objects of universal detestation. It is but justice to the performers in Volpone to acknowledge that they have great merit, if we only except Mr. Smith, who appears in the principal character; Mr. Shuter in the old Miser is masterly beyond expression; Mr. Bensley is seen to remarkable advantage in the Parasite; nor do I recollect any other part which is not admirably executed. In my next I shall consider Timon of Athens; and fearful of having exceeded your limits in criticising The Fox so far, conclude myself here your constant reader, JEREMY COLLIER (c) From an unsigned article in The General Evening Post, 26–8 November 1772, with the subheading ‘Dramatic Strictures’, on Hoadley’s The Suspicious Husband.

Strickland’s jealousy in the play before us is, as the critics have repeatedly observed, borrowed obviously from Kitely in Ben Johnson’s comedy of Every Man in his Humour; but it is an improvement on the original, and is a jealousy more naturally founded and more agreeably worked up. Kitely has no cause for suspecting his wife’s conduct; she has never been absent from him, nor has she any one connection either male or female, to alarm his imagination. Strickland’s wife, on the contrary, has been away from him for some time, at a scene of fashionable dissipation; she brings a lady home with her besides, who is a total stranger to him, and whose excess of vivacity, joined to the irregularity of her hours, might reasonably enough excite the uneasiness of a sober man. Thus far the ground of Strickland’s jealousy is superior to that of Kitely’s; and then with respect to the manner in which the passion is worked up, Hoadly exceeds Johnson beyond the possibility of a comparison; Strickland’s jealousy produces a variety of entertaining consequences, whereas the other is not attended with one; it obliges Clarinda to find a new lodging, it gives birth to Ranger’s scene with her in which she conceals her face with a mask; it enables him to alarm her about Frankly, and promotes the business of the plot with great nicety.

528

165. Shakespeare and Jonson compared 1772

A letter from ‘Horatio’ to The Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1772. Mr. URBAN, In those excellent verses, written by Ben Johnson, to the memory of his beloved William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us, the poet has, without design, fairly characterized himself and his friend: ‘He was not of an age, but for all time.’ Ben’s reputation was partly confined to the age in which he lived, and that which immediately succeeded to it. He delighted to catch the Cynthia of the minute; to paint the follies of the times, which are as uncertain as the forms of court-address, and as changeable as the fashions of our cloaths. Nothing less than general Nature, such as she has been from the first formation of society, and will remain for ever, could satisfy the comprehensive mind of Shakespeare; latest times will find him, as Leonard Digges has happily sung, —‘Fresh to all ages! when posterity Shall loath what’s new, think all is prodigy That is not Shakespeare’s!’ —————1 This is so strictly true, that the poet seems to have written in the very spirit of prophecy: for what has later times produced, that the public will suffer to be compared, or even mentioned, with the master-pieces of this divine genius? in whom we find, what it is in vain to search for elsewhere, such a happy union of fine fancy and rich sense, proper incident, and just character, with true situation, fit moral, and strong passion! It would be an invidious task to run a long parallel between Johnson and Shakespeare; to do it effectually, would only show the poor stock of one writer, and the vast treasures of the other. Ben was rather a good satyrist than a complete poet. He pleased himself with personifying vices and passions; while his great cotemporary drew characters, such as Nature presented to him, or such as she was capable of producing. One exalted, the other debased, the human species. You despise Bobadil, though he makes you laugh. You wish to spend a jolly evening with Falstaff, tho’ you cannot esteem him. In short, Ben contents himself with the humble praise of being the gentleman-usher of Fashion, while Shakespeare is not only Nature’s companion, but sometimes her guide.

530 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Two or three great actors, with much ado, keep alive three or four plays of Johnson; but many of Shakespeare’s dramas, after they have lain dormant above half a century, are revived with fresh lustre, and are seen with perpetual pleasure, and repeated applause. Beaumont, in a copy of verses written to Ben Johnson, tells him, that his sense is so deep, that he will not be understood for a century to come;2 an unlucky and injudicious commendation, in my opinion; for dramatic poetry is addressed to the people in general, and demands the greatest perspicuity. Posterity will never search for meanings which were obscure in the author’s life-time. To deny Johnson a great share of merit would be uncandid and unjust; his Every man in his Humour, the Alchemist, Volpone, and the Silent Woman, are excellent pieces; but written with such labour and art, that Nature sometimes seems to lie buried under them. He tells us, that Shakespeare did not understand the art to blot; he too was equally forgetful of the old adage, manum de tabula.3 For want of remembering this advice, his plays are incumbered with useless ornaments, and are totally divested of that easie and graceful air of negligence which distinguish the writings of Shakespeare. HORATIO. (xlii, 522–3)

NOTES 1 ‘To The Memorie of the deceased Author Maister W.Shakespear’, ll. 7–9 (printed in the First Folio). 2 See No. 23(c), above 3 ‘Hand off the slate’, or ‘leave well alone’.

166. George Steevens on Jonson 1773–8

From Steevens’s first (1773) and second (1778) editions of The Plays of Shakespeare. The bitter reproaches directed against Jonson for his supposed hostility and perfidy to Shakespeare here are representative of a chorus of feeling against Jonson expressed through the notes of the variorum editions of these years. See Introduction, p. 31. (a) From the notes to The Tempest in the 1773 edition. The beauties of this piece could not secure it from the criticism of Ben Jonson, whose malignity sometimes appears to have been more than equal to his wit. [Quotes BF, Induction, ll. 127–30.] (i, 4) (b). From the notes to the 1778 edition. [On The Tempest, 5.1.136:] The unity of time is most rigidly observed in this piece. The fable scarcely takes up a greater number of hours than are employed in the representation; and from the very particular care which our author takes to point out this circumstance in so many other passages, as well as here, it should seem as if it were not accidental, but purposely designed to shew the admirers of Ben Jonson’s art, and the cavillers of the time, that he too could write a play within all the strictest laws of regularity, when he chose to load himself with the critick’s fetters. (i, 106) [On Twelfth Night, 1.1.2:] …Ben Jonson, who takes every opportunity to find fault with Shakespeare, seems to ridicule the conduct of Twelfth-Night in his Every Man out of his Humor, at the end of act III. sc. vi…. [Quotes 3.6.195–201.] (iv, 153) [On Cymbeline, Act V, Scene v:]

532 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Let those that talk so confidently about the skill of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Jonson, point out the conclusion of any one of his plays which is wrought with more artifice, and yet a less degree of dramatic violence than this. In the scene before us all the surviving characters are assembled; and at the expence of whatever incongruity the former events may have produced, perhaps little can be discovered on this occasion to offend the most scrupulous advocate for regularity: and, I think, as little is found wanting to satisfy the spectator by a catastrophe which is intricate without confusion, and not more rich in ornament than in nature. (ix, 323) [On Hamlet’s praise of the Pyrrhus play in Hamlet, 2.2.433–65. Steevens has quoted Warburton’s note on the same passage to the effect that the play quoted was a lost one of Shakespeare’s, an experiment in writing in imitation of Greek tragedy.] Had Shakespeare made one unsuccessful attempt in the manner of the ancients (that he had any knowledge of their rules remains to be proved) it would certainly have been recorded by contemporary writers, among whom Ben Jonson would have been the first. Had his darling ancients been unskilfully imitated by a rival poet he would at least have preserved the memory of the fact, to shew how unsafe it was for anyone who was not as thorough a scholar as himself to have meddled with their sacred remains. ‘Within that circle none durst walk but he’. He has represented Inigo Jones as being ignorant of the very names of those ancients whose architecture he undertook to correct: in his Poetaster he has in several places hinted at our poet’s injudicious use of words, and seems to have pointed his ridicule more than once at some of his descriptions and characters. It is true that he has praised him, but it was not while that praise could have been of any service to him; and posthumous applause is always to be had on easy conditions. Happy it was for Shakespeare that he took nature for his guide, and, engaged in the warm pursuit of her beauties, left to Jonson the repositories of learning: so has he escaped a contest which might have rendered his life uneasy, and bequeathed to our possession the more valuable copies from nature herself. (x, 352–3)

167. Lord Camden on reading Ben Jonson 1774

From a letter to Garrick dated 7 September 1774. Text from The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, ed. James Boaden (1831–2), 2 vols. Charles Pratt (1714–94), first Baron Camden, later first Earl Camden, became Chief Justice and then Lord Chancellor. Garrick mentions in his letters borrowing from him a black-letter romance containing a version of the King Lear story and sharing with him an enthusiasm for Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little, George M.Kahrl, and Phoebe de K.Wilson (Cambridge, Mass. 1963), ii, 881; iii, 1080). I have been employed since I saw you in reading Ben Jonson; for as I have waked generally at five o’clock in the morning, I have spent three hours every day in bed in reperusing my old favourite. I make no comparison, but I do assure you I am beyond expression charmed with the dramatic powers of that author, and, in my opinion, the genius of the writer is equal to his art; nay, so far is he from being deficient in the first, that his own fund would have supplied him with every faculty of wit, humour, and nature, though he had been no scholar. His principal fault, in my judgement, arises from a pedantic imitation of the ancients. His prose dialogue is elegant; his verse hard and too much laboured, but by no means difficult or obscure. Read him again, as I have done, without prejudice, and forget Shakspeare while you are doing it, which is but just; for, to say the truth, he that reads an author with proper attention, has no leisure, while he is so employed, to think of any other. As an orator, I should have bespoke your favour by a panegyric upon Shakespeare before I had presumed to introduce an inferior to your notice; but that subject has been so hackneyed by all mankind, that I can say nothing new upon it. (ii, 1–2)

534

168. Francis Gentleman, notes on Jonson’s ode to Shakespeare 1774

From ‘The Life of Shakespeare’, in volume ix of the nine-volume Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (1773–4). Gentleman has discussed at length the question of Jonson’s relations with Shakespeare, concurring with and indeed paraphrasing Pope in finding partisans of one side or the other responsible for extreme versions of the relationship; he then quotes Jonson’s ‘Ode’ to Shakespeare, ‘to vindicate his character from the charge of envy and malevolence’. [On ll. 3–4, ‘While I confess thy writings to be such/As neither man nor muse can praise too much’:] We think this couplet goes as far in panegyric as can be justified. [On l. 12, ‘And think to ruin where it seemed to praise’:] Johnson here points at and frees himself from the imputation which has been so illnaturedly suggested against him. [On l. 18, ‘The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!’:] Is this lukewarm praise? is it a grudging compliment? [On l. 24, ‘And we have wits to read, and praise to give’:] Though the versification of this Poem is, in general, stiff, and uncouth; yet we perceive great sincerity and warmth of praise in it. [On l. 43, ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’:] Could there be conceived a more comprehensive or more delicate panegyric than this? He who writes temporally, however striking, useful and entertaining, is but a subordinate genius; he who writes for futurity, and upon universal principles, is capital. In this light, Johnson justly draws Shakespeare; what more Dryden would have had1 we cannot say, unless

536 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

such gross daubing as he bestowed in many of his adulatory dedications upon miserable characters; and this would have been disgraceful to the critic and friend. [On l. 55, ‘Yet must I not give nature all: thy art’:] Ben, not satisfied with allowing his friend all natural powers, gives him here the advantages of art; hence it appears he would not have willingly withheld any due point of praise. [On l. 60, ‘(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat’:] This allusion to a Smith’s forge is rather laboured, uncouth and ill applied. [On l. 64, ‘For a good poet’s made, as well as born’:] This observation is extremely just; for mere genius, save some very extraordinary exceptions, is and must be rude without cultivation. A load of learning is prejudicial, but some knowledge of letters, and an extensive intimacy with mankind, are peculiarly requisite for a dramatic writer. [On l. 80, ‘And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light’:] We know not nor can conceive a warmer compliment than this, wherein Johnson throws himself and all other authors aside, to make Shakespeare not only the main, but the sole pillar, of the stage. [Following the poem:] From the remarks we have offered, and we hope not unjustly, it may be inferred, that the preceding lines have more of friendship, than fancy, in them; much more of labour than of genius; they contain strength of thought, but want ease of expression; Ben’s constant fault, (ix, 22–5) NOTE 1 For Dryden’s comment on the ‘Ode’, see Introduction, p. 12.

169. David Garrick on confidence tricks in The Alchemist 1774

From a letter to Herbert Lawrence, dated 10 January 1774. Reprinted by permission from The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M.Little, George M.Kahrl, and Phoebe de K. Wilson (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1963), 3 vols. Lawrence had sent Garrick a comedy to read which evidently revolved around an improbable deception. The ‘Otacousticon’ mentioned in the extract is a fantastic instrument for amplifying sound, described in Thomas Tomkis’s adaptation of Della Porta’s L’Astrologo, Albumazar (1615), which Garrick had adapted in his turn in 1773. Pandolpho is a character in the same play. …we have so many Cheaters & Cheatees upon the Stage, Such as are in the Alchymist, Albumazar &c that I fear unless some very New Method & pleasant Method of galling the Credulous was found out, —an Audience would be very Squeamish—The TYCHOTHOLICON of Feignwell would be thought an Imitation of the Otacousticon of Albumazar, & the transmutation of Vegetables put ’em in mind of the transmutation of Metals in the Alchymist— Pandolpho & Sr Epicure Mammon are the old Gulls, & to be Sure had their Effect when the Transformation of persons, & transmutation of Metals were talk’d of, & believ’d by 19 in 20—even now by the force of writing they are Suffer’d —but indeed it is by a force upon the Understanding, & are but barely born, & I am certain would be condemn’d (with all their Merit) were they now for the first time to be Acted. (iii, 916–17)

538

170. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Garrick’s Abel Drugger 1775

From a letter dated 1 October 1775, printed in Deutsches Museum (1776), i. Translation from Lichtenberg’s Visits to England by Margaret L.Mare and W.H.Quarrell (Oxford 1938), pp. 2–4. Lichtenberg (1742–99) was a Professor of Physics at Göttingen University and spent over a year in England in 1774–5. Among the characters I have mentioned they say that Weston equals him as Abel Drugger, as did Quin formerly as Sir John Brute; but as yet no man has set foot on the British stage who is his equal in the other parts; moreover, there is no one who can hope to come up to such a man in any one part, still less to play them all with the same ease. I should fancy, too, that any comparison with Quin and Weston is made with due reservation. I was not able, indeed, to see Quin as Sir John Brute, and I have not yet seen Weston as Abel Drugger; but similar pronouncements on Garrick—and this, indeed, in parts where I could compare them—have rendered me very sceptical. I am, rather, more or less convinced that in parts that he has once taken no one may absolutely surpass him who is not a Garrick, with soul and body permeated with histrionic talent; and England has never seen on its stage another such man. I must explain to you what bearing the opinion of those persons of Weston and Quin has on the matter, at the same time telling you much concerning Mr. Garrick that I might otherwise have forgotten; moreover, I should not like you to conclude from all that I have said that I do not like Weston, a man at present the idol of the people, who made me laugh more than all the rest of the English players together. Later I will tell you more about him, but for the present the following will serve my purpose. Weston is one of the drollest creatures on whom I have ever set eyes. Figure, voice, demeanour and all about him move one to laughter, although he never seems to desire this and himself never laughs. Scarcely has he appeared on the stage than a large part of the audience becomes oblivious of the play and heeds nothing but him and his antics. You see, then, that before such judges a man like this cannot play badly. People have eyes for him alone. With Garrick it is quite otherwise, for one perpetually sees him as an effective part of the whole and a faithful mirror of nature. Therefore he could play his part badly in the eyes of his England, while Weston could scarce do so. Now Ben Jonson has indicated only a few points in Abel Drugger’s character; and if a player can once get his line from this, he can proceed more a less à son aise with no fear of overstepping the mark. Weston has an excellent opportunity of ridding himself of his own personality, especially in the long

540 BEN JONSON

intervals when Abel Drugger is dumb and in a room where there are, besides a few astronomers and exercisers, human skeletons, crocodiles, ostrich eggs and empty vessels, in which the devil himself could sit. I can almost see him, rigid with terror at every violent movement of the astrologer or at the least noise of which the cause is not apparent, standing like a mummy with feet together; only when it is over does life return to his eyes and he looks about him, then turns his head round slowly, and so forth. Most of the audience clap and laugh, and even the critic smiles at the ridiculous fellow. But when Garrick plays Abel Drugger it is the critic who leads the applause. Here we have a vastly different creature, an epitome of the author’s purpose, heightened by a comprehensive knowledge of his characteristic traits, and interpreted so that he may be clearly understood from the top gallery downwards. He does not lack the language of gesture, if I may so express it, in an indolent all-embracing torpidity, which finally, indeed, becomes unnatural; but every moment poor Abel is giving fresh indications of his character; superstition and simplicity. I only mention one feature, which Mr. Weston could not even imitate and assuredly could not have invented, and of which I do not suppose the author himself had thought. When the astrologers spell out from the stars the name, Abel Drugger, henceforth to be great, the poor gullible creature says with heartfelt delight: ‘That is my name.’1 Garrick makes him keep his joy to himself, for to blurt it out before every one would be lacking in decency. So Garrick turns aside, hugging his delight to himself for a few moments, so that he actually gets those red rings round his eyes which often accompany great joy, at least when violently suppressed, and says to himself: ‘That is my name.’ The effect of this judicious restraint is indescribable, for one did not see him merely as a simpleton being gulled, but as a much more ridiculous creature, with an air of secret triumph, thinking himself the slyest of rogues. Nothing like this can be expected of Weston. But when his own particular simplicity of demeanour suits the play, he does wonders…. NOTE 1 A line added to Act II, Scene vi, of the play; see the printed version of Garrick’s adaptation, The Alchymist. As altered from Ben Jonson (1777), p. 40.

171. George Colman’s Epicoene 1776

Colman shortened the play, removed profanities and indelicate references and postponed the revelation that Epicoene was not as mute as she first seemed, in his own words ‘cured the injudicious anti-climax of the fable’ (unsigned review of the play, The Monthly Review (April 1776), liv, 312). The altered play opened at Garrick’s Drury Lane Theatre on 13 January 1776. It played on only three more nights, closing on 23 January. The alteration was revived for a single performance at Covent Garden on 26 April 1784. For an account of the alteration, see Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage 1660–1776, pp. 208–13. Colman (1732–94) was manager at Covent Garden from 1767 to 1774. He also drew on Epicoene for his ‘Musical Entertainment’ Ut Pictura Poesis! Or, The Enraged Musician (1789) —the enraged musician in question being tormented by a systematic campaign of cacophonous noises—and adapted The Masque of Oberon as The Fairy Prince, performed as an afterpiece in the season of 1771–2. (a) Colman’s prologue, from the published version of his adaptation, Epicoene; or, the Silent Woman. A Comedy, Written by Ben Jonson. As it is Acted in the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane. With Alterations, By George Colman (1776). Happy the soaring bard who boldly wooes, And wins the favour of, the tragic muse! He from the grave may call the mighty dead, In buskins and blank verse the stage to tread; On Pompeys and old Cæsars rise to fame, And join the poet’s to th’ historian’s name. The comick wit, alas! whose eagle eyes Pierce Nature thro’, and mock the time’s disguise, Whose pencil living follies brings to view, Survives those follies, and his portraits too; Like star-gazers, deplores his luckless fate, For last year’s Almanacks are out of date. ‘The Fox, the Alchemist, the Silent Woman, Done by Ben Jonson, are out-done by no man.’ Thus sung in rough, but panegyrick, rhimes, The wits and criticks of our author’s times.

542 BEN JONSON

But now we bring him forth with dread and doubt, And fear his learned socks are quite worn out. The subtle Alchemist grows obsolete, And Drugger’s humour scarcely keeps him sweet. To-night, if you would feast your eyes and ears, Go back in fancy near two hundred years; A play of Ruffs and Farthingales review, Old English fashions, such as then were new! Drive not Tom Otter’s Bulls and Bears away; Worse Bulls and Bears disgrace the present day. On fair Collegiates let no critick frown! A Ladies’ Club still hold its rank in town. If modern Cooks, who nightly treat the pit, Do not quite cloy and surfeit you with wit, From the old kitchen please to pick a bit! If once, with hearty stomachs to regale On old Ben Jonson’s fare, tho’ somewhat stale, A meal on Bobadil you deign’d to make, Take Epicœne for his and Kitely’s sake! (b) Colman’s ‘Advertisement’ to the printed version. The Editor of the following Comedy always considered it as one of the principal duties of a Director of a Theatre, to atone, in some measure, for the mummery which his situation obliges him to exhibit, by bringing forward the productions of our most esteemed Writers. The alterations he hazarded for this purpose having been generally approved, it is needless to point out or enforce their propriety: much less can he think it necessary to vindicate the established reputation of the Author. Writers of the most distinguished taste and genius have honoured the SILENT WOMAN of BEN JONSON with the most lavish encomiums; but the Criticks of our day, unawed by authority, and trusting to the light of their own understanding, have discovered, that there is neither ingenuity nor contrivance in the Fable, nature in the Characters, nor wit nor humour in the Dialogue. The present Editor, however, cannot pay them so high a compliment, as to suppose it incumbent on him to defend the Author and his admirers, or to make any apology for having, with the kind assistance of Mr. Garrick, promoted the revival of Epicœne; the perusal of which he recommends in the Closet, to those acute spirits who thought it unworthy of the Stage. We think our Fathers fools so wise we grow! Our wiser Sons, no doubt, will think us so. (c) Diary entry on the opening night by William Hopkins. Hopkins (d. 1780) was for twenty years from 1760 prompter at Drury Lane, and kept a diary of events at the playhouse, now in the Folger Library. Printed from the transcription in LS, Part iv, p. 1944. The performance was on Saturday, 13 January 1776. Characters New Dressed in the Habits of the Times. This play is alter’d by Mr Colman and receiv’d with Some Applause, but it don’t seem to hit the present Taste a few hisses at the End.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 543

(d) Unsigned review by Henry Bate, The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Monday, 15 January 1776, headed ‘Theatrical Critique’. Henry Bate (1745–1824), one of the editors of the paper from 1772 to 1780, was rector of a parish in Essex but preferred to spend most of his time in London. He attacked individuals freely in his journal and gained financial success for it and considerable notoriety. The review was reprinted in the Westminster Magazine (January 1776), iv, 29–30, with a less flattering account of the acting: Bensley as Morose is described there as ‘the worst Old Man we ever saw. He presents the countenance of a sickly old Woman; and the uniform goggle of his eye, by which he means to express infirmity and distress, is the look of a man in anguish from the colic’ (iv, 30). Drury-lane. BEN JONSON’S Comedy called Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, was revived on Saturday evening last at this Theatre, under the immediate direction of Mr. Colman; who conceived that if properly got up, it could not fail of affording high entertainment to a modern audience; how far this idea was well founded, will appear from a slight review of the comedy: — The fable of the piece, like those of the old Bards, is trifling, broken, and confused: — that of Old Morose being gulled into a settlement of his estate upon his nephew, &c. by True-wit’s designs; who from the beginning to the end of the piece, is employed in the most unnatural stratagems to effect it—As to character, notwithstanding the traditional observation of Mr. Dryden, who tells us, ‘that a character of this whimsical nature really existed in the author’s day,’1 we think Morose a most absurd caricatura, the offspring of the Poet’s own brain. —But even giving Ben Jonson his grounds in this particular, he is highly censurable for not preserving it from the dramatic bathos, in which we frequently lose every trait of the intended character; for at times he has forgotten to let him be affected, even by the most powerful noises. —Sir Am. La Foole and Sir John Daw, are evident copies of Master Matthew, and Master Stephen, and Cutbeard is the shadow of Brainworm, in Every Man in his Humour: —True-wit is the only one like a finished character; and that is exceedingly overcharged, to produce—no effect whatever. A part of Tom Otter is very humerous, particularly in the drunken scene, with his bull, bear, and horse, where he gives a description of his wife’s taking herself to pieces over night, and next day being put together like a German clock: —but the merit of this part of the character is destroyed, by the absurdity of the succeeding one, where this sneaking driveller, after going off almost dead drunk, is ordered by True-wit to come on in the habit of a Parson, and to harrangue in Latin for half an hour before Morose, with Cutbeard, (a pretended Doctor of Laws) respecting the numberless causes and grounds for a divorce, in order further to gull the old man. —Dauphine and Clerimont are two poor animals indeed, the mere puppets of True-wit, who moves them at will: —Epicoene is of the same stamp; as for the college ladies, which were the witty Coterie of their days, how has the poet coloured them? Why he has given us four insignificant females in chalks, without a single stroke to distinguish them from any insensibles of that sex, and moves them on and off the stage, without producing the least effect. Mrs. Otter is an exception; for she gives us a tolerable likeness of the virago of those times. As to situation, the only one attempted in the play, is in that scene, where La Foole and Sir John Daw are so far the dupes of True-wit’s waggery, as to fear the wrath of each other, and therefore consent the one to be kick’d, the other to be hood-winked, and have his nose pulled

544 BEN JONSON

by his supposed antagonist; and this for the diversion of Dauphine and True wit, who perform the operations. —This is farcical to the highest degree, not to say improbable; but Ben Johnson never suffered his gulls once to open an eye, when he had destined them to fall into a trap. We have ventured to speak freely of this Piece in its original state as it strikes us, uninfluenced by great names, notwithstanding Mr. Dryden himself stiles it the first comedy in the English language. As to the stile of Jonson’s writing, compared to his contemporaries, it appears much more correct and classical than theirs: —In this he triumphed not a little, and that even personally over Shakespeare, who, in erudition, was confessedly his inferior: —Let it be remarked, however, that the former seldom wrote a single page without various close imitations, from the Greek and Roman authors; —but Shakespeare, having neither his learned resources, nor his pedantry, was forced to fly to Nature’s simple volume, and borrow from her pages: —hence, the superior immortality of his genius. Let us now examine what alterations has this Comedy undergone, in order to adapt it to the taste of the present times, and as performed on Saturday evening. Mr. Colman’s alterations of the Epicoene, consist only of several judicious cuttings, and advantageous transpositions; for we do not find that he has given us any additions, at least no material ones; this perhaps from the veneration he bears the memory of Old Ben: —it is to be regretted, however, that from that, or any other false delicacy, the piece should have been brought out, with so much of the rust of antiquity remaining about it, when it is well known Mr. Colman is so capable of doing it infinite service, if he chose to sit down to it: What a very small part of the audience for instance knew, that Ned Whiting, and George Stone [3.1.49–50], were two celebrated Bears, who went in those days by the names of their respected owners: —we do not see the necessity of retaining the passage at all; but if Mr. Colman thought so, it was certainly as easy as necessary to make it discernible to the audience. —We could point out many of these obsolete phrases in this piece, which might readily be spared, as we do not find that much wit or humour would be lost in the omission: —we would recommend the next time of performance, a plentiful cutting of the civil-law consultation scene, between Cutbeard, Otter, &c. in disguise; as the full design of the author may be answered much better in a third of the dialogue: —And it cannot be an improper intimation, that the character of Epicoene should be played by a male, if the denouement is to be brought about by any natural means, to produce the least effect: —the coolness with which the audience received the discovery is a proof of the propriety of this remark. Upon the whole we cannot esteem it a striking comedy, even with the assistances it has now received, the fine manner in which it is certainly got up, and the great expence which the Managers have been at in habiting the whole dramatis personæ, in splendid and characteristic old English dresses. As to the performers they exerted every nerve; Mr. King did more than possibly could have been expected in La Fool: Mr. Parsons was very great in Daw; Mr. Bensley’s Morose was capital; now and then he forgot the surly old man, and sunk into the superannuated driveller: It must be considered as a great undertaking for a young man, and no doubt his apprehensions on the first night, prevented a regular display of his powers: —We conceive Mr. King should have played it. Mr. Yates’s Otter, and Mr. Baddely’s Cutbeard were all we could expect. —Mr. Palmer was admirable in the long unprofitable part of True-wit, and discovered great spirit and comic vivacity through every scene: —Cleremont, and Dauphine, altho’ trifling parts, were well performed by Mess. Brereton, and Davis.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 545

The ladies in general played well. Mrs. Siddons acquired great applause in the spirited part of Epicoene; and Mrs. Hopkins was not behind hand in Mrs. Otter. —Upon the whole the play had great justice done it in representation by the performers as well as the managers. A Prologue by Mr. Colman preceded the piece (recommending this old English dish to modern palates) remarkable only for a happy comparison of the present bulls and bears of ’Change-alley to those of Tom Otter, and the Coterie of the present ton to that of the College Ladies in the days of Ben Johnson. (e) Unsigned review in The London Magazine (January 1776), xlv.

Jan. 15. On Saturday evening Ben Jonson’s comedy of the Silent Woman, as altered by Mr. Colman, was revived at Drury-Lane. This comedy was esteemed by his cotemporaries one of the best, and by that great genius and incomparable judge, Mr. Dryden, one of the most perfect models of dramatic composition, then extant in the English language. Ben was well acquainted with the Greek and Roman Drama, and had studied with great attention the commentaries of the ancient critics, and the rules they established. He has given frequent proofs of this in almost all his plays, but in none more than in the one under consideration. Yet from his strong conception of the ridiculous in life, his high colouring, and finished likenesses, it is more than probable, he would have succeeded better in this species of writing, had he consulted his own genius more, and attended less to the documents of those who have vainly attempted in vague phrases and loose floating ideas to embody into a system of dramatic laws, what, from their nature and mutability, can never be fixed or realized. Shakespeare, if he knew those bonds, broke them; if he did not, he proved how much genius is superior to art. We would not be here understood to sanction the reveries of a distempered brain, or the frothy ebullitions of a luxuriant fanciful imagination and call that nature. Man is the subject, human-nature is consequently the source we must draw from. To describe the human heart, as actuated from within, or affected from without, and strip it of its various coverings; to analyse and mark the human mind in its innumerable operations; to connect those with the manners, habits, humours, and prevailing follies of the times, are the true qualifications of a dramatic writer. Ben Jonson was certainly possessed of those talents, but he as certainly sacrificed too much to the opinion of others, and the prevailing taste of the age in which he wrote. On the other hand, he too frequently indulged his genius, and gave way to the impressions he received at an early period of his life. As a modern author justly observes, ‘his wit was sometimes low, and his humour excessive’ so that while his rigid notions of the Drama forbad him to draw with a masterly hand after the models which nature daily presented, his juvenile habits led his attention to objects not always the best selected, or worthy of his pen. Ben was besides a pedant, as well as a scholar, and like his cotemporary Cervantes, was tinctured with the very folly which was the fixed object of his most pointed ridicule. These, we take it, were some of the chief reasons, that Jonson’s plays do not bear the high reputation they did for almost a century after they were written; and will remain, we may venture to predict, an insurmountable bar to their ever recovering their former reputation, except where indeed they happen to be uncommonly well-supported in the representation; which, truth compels us to say, was not the case on Saturday evening. Another cause why the works of Jonson and the writers of that age will always be cooly received, by a great majority of the young and old folks, which usually frequent our theatres is, being totally ignorant of the prevailing manners of the court and city, in the

546 BEN JONSON

region of Elizabeth and James. This may be readily conceived, when even the rusticity of Sir Francis Wronghead2 is almost become obsolete. There are very few members, if any, in the House of Commons, if they were to sit now for the picture, would give a tolerable likeness, though we are perfectly satisfied that Vanbrugh copied faithfully from nature, and cloathed his portrait with manners and habits really existing in the reign of George I. Mr. Colman seems to have executed his plan very hastily. The play in its present form, is in our opinion unskilfully mutilated, and disfigured. It is neither Ben Jonson’s, nor Colman’s; but remains of the doubtful gender. The parts were not judiciously cast, and the transposition of the scenes, so highly extolled by the critics of the day, is far from being intitled to the commendations so lavishly bestowed on it. (xlv, 48–9) NOTES 1 See No. 67, above. 2 In The Provoked Husband, by Sir John Vanbrugh, completed by Colley Cibber.

172. Kitely preferred to Ford 1778

From an article by ‘Trim’, The Morning Post, 9 October 1778. No. 3 of a series entitled ‘The Theatre’. The Merry Wives of Windsor and Every Man in his Humour were both in the repertoire in the 1778–9 season at Drury Lane, with William Smith (? 1730–89) taking the roles of Ford and of Kitely. Mr. Smith (whom as an actor, and man, I respect not a little, has too much sense not to turn these remarks, if founded in truth to due account) is not sufficiently discriminating in jealous characters, and assimilates Ford and Kitely so connectedly, as to produce exactly the same ideas, though they differ not a little. Ford has some shadow of right to be suspicious, Kitely is most whimsically jealous; the latter I verily believe to have been borrowed from the former, but the scholar for once greatly exceeds the genius. Kitely is a most masterly drawing of human imbecility in some of her most critical, and interesting situations, and admits that prodigious variety of fine acting, that I never expect to see it, like Macbeth, and many other parts, properly performed, since the retirement of the never-to-be-equalled Garrick. It is a tribute however due to Smith, that he is the best Kitely at present on the stage, nor need it be wondered that he should be defective in a part, which I may term the most accurate, and best finished picture in the whole English dramatic exhibition, Othello not excepted.

548

173. Thomas Davies on Jonson revivals 1780

From Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq. (1780), 2 vols. Davies (c. 1712–85) was an actor and then a bookseller. He introduced Boswell to Johnson in his shop in 1763. [On Garrick’s comic roles:] He was, indeed, by way of relief to his more toilsome labours, in parts of exertion, induced to divert and relax himself with some low comic parts, and particularly Abel Drugger in Johnson’s Alchymist. The younger Cibber had been for many years famous for acting Abel; but Cibber was never commended for strictly adhering to nature, in the drawing of his characters: whether he had acquired a sort of extravagant manner, from his frequently playing ancient Pistol with applause; or, whether he imagined that every imposition upon the understanding of an audience, which happened to be applauded, was justifiable, I know not, but he mixed so much grimace and ridiculous tricks in playing this part, that although the galleries laughed and clapped their hands, the judicious part of the spectators was displeased. Garrick’s Abel Drugger was of a different species from Cibber’s. The moment he came upon the stage he discovered such aukward simplicity, and his looks so happily bespoke the ignorant, selfish, and absurd tobacco-merchant, that it was a contest not easily to be decided, whether the bursts of laughter or applause were loudest. Through the whole part he strictly preserved the modesty of nature. (i, 54–5) [On Garrick’s casting in Every Man in his Humour:] …all the personages were so exactly fitted to the look, voice, figure and talents of the actor, that no play which comprehends so many distinct peculiarities of humour, was ever perhaps so compleatly acted; and to this care of the manager in restoring this obsolete play to the stage, may very justly be attributed its great success; for this comedy had often been brought upon the stage before, particularly in the time of Charles the Second, under the patronage of the witty earl of Dorset, and other noblemen of taste, but it had never before greatly pleased the people. (i, 112–13) [On the plays of Samuel Foote:]

550 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Foote saw the follies and vices of mankind with a quick and discerning eye; his discrimination of characters was critical and exact; his humour pleasant, his ridicule keen, his satire pungent, and his wit brilliant and exuberant. He described with fidelity the changeable follies and fashions of the times; and his pieces, like those of Ben Jonson, were calculated to please the audience of the day; and for this reason posterity will scarce know any thing of them. Of Ben Jonson’s plays it was observed, above sixty years since, that they could not be represented for want of proper actors; the same may be said of the productions of Mr. Foote. (ii, 260)

174. B.Walwyn, Falstaff and Bobadil 1782

From An Essay on Comedy (1782). At the end of the essay Walwyn printed a letter from ‘Philo-Drama’ —identified in Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vi, 324, as Thomas Davies—and his own reply. Walwyn (b. 1750) also wrote a novel, The Errors of Nature; or, The History of Charles Manley (1783), a farce, and a number of musical pieces. CHARACTERS should not be drawn with temporary traits; for such grow obsolete with the fashion of the times. This is the fate of most of Johnson’s characters—particularly those in Every Man in his Humour. While those in the play⋆ from whence most of them seem to have been taken, will exist with human nature, Captain Bobadil is a starvling Falstaff, without either his wit or his humour. Master Stephen is a tolerable likeness of Master Slender. Kitely imitates Ford in all but his sense. Downright is the testy Shallow without his humour. Dame Kitely is the shadow of Mrs. Ford. Thus we perceive these characters of Shakespeare are disguised by Johnson, with an affected resemblance to some particular persons of that period. If, therefore, this play of Johnson’s hath ever pleased since, it proves the discernment of the manager, and the abilities of the performers; the first in casting the parts, the latter in playing them so satisfactorily as we have generally seen them. This suggests to me an observation, which may be as well applied to theatrical performers in general, as to every other artist; —difficulty excites endeavour, which is the parent of excellence. Thus we often find the most difficult performances more frequently excellent than such as require but little exertion. This appears the reason of the most eminent painters failing in caricatura, and eminent writers in what they found beneath their abilities and attention. Tiny artists can only excel in tiny subjects. There is a tone of genius as of music, which can never touch with the harmony of perfection a subject that is beneath its powers or compass. Therefore, the failure of artists may as often be attributed to a superior talent, as to its deficiency. So that critics would shew their discernment and liberality in not condemning failing ability, until opportunity and experience have tried its powers. To return, the difference of temporary and eternal† characters is particularly displayed between those of Shakespeare and of Johnson. I shall, therefore, consider the traits of the one, and the tints of the other. For in Johnson the passions are scarcely coloured, but in Shakespeare they are imitated by feeling. ALTHOUGH it has been said—Shakespeare’s Falstaff was meant to satirize a particular person of his day, every one who looks at human nature will find Falstaffs in abundance. But

552 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

they will never find a Bobadil. Falstaff is a voluptuous knave, gross in sense, manners, and appearance. His pleasantry depending on his sack, and his cowardice on his selfishness. Every trait is consistent with each other. Had Shakespeare given him courage, he would have made him inconsistent with himself; the sordid and selfish may be desperate, but never courageous. They dread the loss of enjoyment in their lives, and therefore never hazard life but when emergency makes them desperate. This consistency will make Falstaff a character of entertainment whenever it may be represented. How different is the fate of Bobadil, who never pleases but from the grotesqueness of the dress, and the outré humour of the performer’s speech and action. The reason is, he is an empty, lying braggart, without any determinate view or principle of action. These traits are trifling, and not genuine. We seldom see pride without some merit, or vanity without some view for supporting it, or hypocrisy without design. Appearances are assumed to acquire the possession of realities. Courage is often feigned to procure safety, love to procure enjoyment, wealth to procure credit, and friendship to procure service. But the braggadisms of Bobadil are void of every end or intention, except vanity. Such a character may exist, and yet, it will rarely be found, but in Every Man in his Humour. I am aware many will say vain-boasters are common. Let them, however, produce me one without any principle of action, and I will acknowledge that one to be the Bobadil of Nature. Superficial observers may say, vanity is a means without an end. But that would be a nonentity of expression. It has no meaning. Even caprice, which seems to burlesque all principle of action, changes from a desire of novelty. Vanity only differs from pride in its object. We are vain of trifles, and proud of worth. Both have one final cause, or principle, which is consequence—the basis of self-complacency. But surely Bobadil can have no selfcomplacency, unless it be escaping with whole bones from the anger of Downright. Notwithstanding farce is the caricatura of the drama, we have a character in Garrick’s Miss in her Teens, that is of the same stamina, but far superior. It is Bobadil naturalized. I mean Captain Flash. Flash has an intention in his affected bravery. He means it to frighten his antagonist, Fribble. He is not, like many cowards, brave through fear. He appears brave through policy. In both there is reason; and reason is nature. The farcical character of Flash must be, therefore, preferred to the comic character of Bobadil. Having said so much on these two leading characters, I trust they will be considered a sufficient specimen of the rest. THUS, having elucidated the difference of SHAKESPEARE’S and BEN JONSON’S characters, it appears the first bear the seal of nature, and the latter that of paltry counterfeits. Their temporary disguise only served to render them as inconsistent with themselves, as they deviate from the beauty of their archetypes. The gauze of artifice is drawn aside, and Johnson appears the grossest of plagiarists. (8–12) [From Philo-Drama’s letter.] I PERFECTLY agree with the Author that characters should be drawn with temporary traits. I grant too, that the portraits of Shakespeare are made to last till Doomsday; while the lustring and fashionable shadows of the day drawn by Ben Johnson, grow obsolete in the wearing of them. But he has unhappily mistaken his aim. The characters of Every Man in his Humour could not be taken from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor; for the former play was prior to the latter about three years: this he will find authenticated in the last variorum edition of Shakespeare, published by Johnson and Stevens. We might with

BEN JONSON 553

equal truth, and with some plausibility, say that our divine bard borrowed his characters of Falstaff, Ford, Slender, Shallow, and Mrs. Ford, from the Bobadil, Kitely, Master Stephen, Downright, and Dame Kitely of Johnson. For my own part, I can see no family likeness, either in the personage or conduct of the two plays. They are both strongly discriminated. Poor Old Ben is fallen so low in the opinion of the public, that it would be a charity to give him a lift where we possibly can. The Slender of Shakespeare is not, in my humble judgment, so proper a character for Comedy, as the Master Stephen of Johnson; the latter is the Fop of Fashion, the other, the Fool of Nature; and for that reason an object of comic mirth. We may as well laugh at the lame and the blind, as the meer changling, the poor abortive escape of propagation. Though I do not entirely approve his criticism on Bobadil, I admire his masterly outline of Falstaff. (23–4) [In his reply, Walwyn refuses to accept that Every Man in his Humour predates The Merry Wives of Windsor, and then reiterates the similarities of Jonson’s play to Shakespeare’s:] Has not Falstaff the traits of vanity, boasting, and cowardice? Are not these the only traits of Bobadil? Is not Ford jealous without cause, and passionate without revenge? For all the punishment Falstaff receives is from the hurt, pride, and indignation of Mrs. Ford, and Mrs. Page. Can it be said that Kitely has any other traits, or circumstances? His observation in respect to the Fool of Nature not being a proper character for Comedy, does him honour; but this greatly depends in what light that fool is placed. If placed in a ridiculous light, we must then despise the author, and pity the character. Should he be placed in merely a risible light, he then becomes an innocent uninjured character to enliven the scene. Ridicule is Satire seated in the vehicle of Mirth. Risibility is Innocence seated in the vehicle of Humour. Shakespeare’s Slender is not a character of ridicule, but of risibility; but Johnson’s Stephen, being ridiculous, blends our contempt with our laughter. This reply to his observations on Slender and Stephen is rather too early; but as the character followed Ford, I could not avoid these observations. Further, in discriminating a difference of these characters, he has omitted the leading trait of Stephen, which absolutely renders him Slender transposed from Shakespeare to Johnson. That he is the Fool of Nature I admit; but is not Stephen the Fool of Nature, as well as the Fop of Fashion? Indeed the Fop of Fashion, although too generally the Fool of Nature, gives him too great a dignity. He mistakes the grotesque braggadisms, and outré actions of Bobadil, for fashion. The Fop of Fashion is he whose only merit is to be fashionable. But Stephen, being destitute of all other ideas, neither has, nor can have, any just idea of fashion. From this trait of simplicity arises the only humour of his character—the aukward imitation of Bobadil; and the only difference perceptible in Shallow and Downright, is the first being testy with brutality—the latter with humour and pleasantry. When leading traits are thus evidently the same, it is beneath weakness not to admit of their resemblance. All their discrimination is, in the plagiarist, but a superficial disguise to conceal their likeness. (30– 1) NOTES • Merry Wives of Windsor. † If I may use the expression.

554

175. Colman’s Volpone revived 1783

Colman’s version was first produced in 1771 (No. 163, above). It was put on again in 1785, at Drury Lane; this was the last revival of the play until 1921. (a) Review in The Morning Chronicle, 13 September 1783. Unsigned, under the heading ‘THEATRICAL INTELLIGENCE’. The performance was at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on 12 September. Ben Johnson’s admirable Comedy, of the FOX, was last night revived at the Haymarket Theatre, and received with loud and repeated plaudits. —The play is now brought forward with additional alterations to those made by Mr. Colman, when he revived it at Covent-Garden Theatre; and the alterations are such as manifestly improve the Stage effect of the piece very considerably. They chiefly consist of the omission of the characters of Sir Politick Would-be and Lady Would-be, and consequently of the several scenes in which these characters are employed. It is needless to dilate on the merit of the Comedy, the great art and ingenuity of the plot, the natural and strong display of characteristic humour throughout, and the power of the ridicule and satire having been long since universally felt and admired by every judge of dramatic excellence. The reviving it in such a stile, does Mr. Colman infinite honour: —it may be considered as a classical bonne bouche to the bill of fare he has served up to the town during the past summer. Last night’s representation also reflects very great credit on his Theatre and performers. The characters were in general well acted, but those of Corbachio and Mosca, incomparably, by Parsons and Bensley; nor ought the well-worn earnestness of Corvino, the happy effrontery of Volpone, the comic manner of Voltore’s pleading, or the innocent zeal of Celia, to escape our particular notice. Aickin, Palmer, Bannister jun. and Mrs. Inchbald, having every title to an especial expression of our approbation. (b) From John Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, Comedian (1839), 2 vols.

Adolphus (1768–1845) was a barrister and a writer on historical subjects, among others. He had known Bannister well. Mr. Colman’s revival was supported by the whole strength of his dramatic company. Palmer—in the best of his days, ardent, buoyant, and endowed with everlasting vivacity, —supported the character of the simulating voluptuary; his declamation, his malignant

556 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

mirth, his audacious love, and, in the end, his manly, uncontrollable anger, were all equally great, all irresistible. Bensley showed, in the character of Mosca, the knowledge of stage business, and the judgment which an excellent understanding, fortified by long practice, could supply; and, in playing this part, all those peculiarities which afforded a theme to minor critics, and a pattern to inferior mimics, seemed to be discarded. There was no peculiar solemnity in his port, but on the contrary he was brisk and agile; his eye glared not with its usual significancy, but was illumined with archness and satirical pleasantry; and his voice, unincumbered with his nasal twang, gave out, with sonorous vivacity, the sarcastic observations which the other characters provoked. Addison, in the Spectator, has mentioned in terms of the highest applause Mr. Johnson’s performance of Corbaccio, but it is impossible to conceive a picture more perfect than that displayed by Parsons; it was, notwithstanding the distaste it created, irresistibly comic. It was that of a man reduced by age to the lowest state of decrepitude, —lame, deaf, almost blind; abounding in wealth, and yet so desirous of increasing it, that he descends to the low arts of a legacy-hunter, prepares to disinherit his virtuous son, and even accedes to a proposal to murder the sick man, that he may shorten the period of anxious expectation. Around this character Parsons threw the charm of his pungent humour, and made it one of the most striking exhibitions the theatre had ever produced. Splenetic impatience, jealous irritability, hasty suspicion, were associated with stupid misintelligence, idiotic repetition of phrases, and a blundering assent to propositions which he could not distinctly hear, or rightly understand. So much infirmity would not have been comic, but for the admixture of vice; nor could so much vice have been endured, had it not been qualified by a little pity for age, decrepitude, and a failing intellect. To Bannister was assigned the part of Voltore the lawyer, and the impression he made was strong and favourable. The character is not marked by any peculiar feature of vice, or any act of extraordinary flagitiousness. He takes a ticket in the Volpone lottery, and helps to turn the wheel, in hopes of gaining the prize. In the first scene, he presents to the pretended invalid a massy piece of plate; and receives from his contrivance, and the words of Mosca, the assurance that he is sole heir, the will just executed, ‘the wax warm, and the ink scarce dry.’ In this there is little scope for the exercise of Bannister’s talent; yet he did all that could be effected, and prepared the audience to expect higher exertions. Much of his peculiar humour was displayed in listening to the advice and promises of Mosca, and particularly in his manner of receiving the left-handed compliment to his profession: [Quotes 1.3.52–66] In the progress of the comedy, events arise which call forth the exertions of the advocate to plead a cause in the scrutineo, or senate-house. In this scene or rather scenes, —for there is a sort of supplemental hearing, —Bannister displayed his powers to the utmost advantage. He delivered a long speech with exaggerated emphasis, marked his antitheses with curious changes of enunciation, threw forth his abuse with thundering vehemence, and appealed to passion, pity, and feeling, with insinuating softness. In his mode of declaiming he was reported to have copied in some degree the manner of Mr. Fox, then in the vigour of his age, at the height of his renown, and a leading member of the administration then in power, generally called ‘the Coalition Ministry.’ Mr. Fox had the habit of striking his hat with his fist while speaking, and is said sometimes to have utterly

BEN JONSON 557

ruined a new dress feathered hat in one debate. Bannister adopted this peculiarity, and laid about him with most impressive energy. But his triumph was yet to come. Before the second hearing, new occurrences made Voltore desirous to undo the effect of his former pleading, and he had sent to the judges a statement in writing of the frauds which had been practised on them. While he is supporting this new statement, another change in the aspect of affairs renders it necessary for him to retract his confession and regain his old position. But how? After much confused hesitation, he adopts a mode of conduct suggested by Mosca, and pretends that his late proceedings have been the effect of diabolical possession. At this period Bannister’s voice falters; his eyes look wild, amazed and haggard; his full, bold sentences dwindle down into ill-composed, unconnected, unintelligible phrases; and at last, in a manner which he alone could attain, he throws himself on the floor, with an epileptic plunge, violent, desperate, and yet in the highest degree comic: and when Mosca, to humour the deceit, described pretended symptoms, his vomiting crooked pins, his eyes being just like a dead hen’s in a poulterer’s shop, and the passage of the fiend through various parts of his body, till at length it flies out, like a blue toad with bat’s wings, —corresponding contortions and appearances were adopted, and the audience were in an ecstasy of delight. ‘Volpone’ had only been played three nights when the theatre closed… (i, 9–7)

558

176. Thomas Davies, observations on Jonson 1783–4

From Dramatic Micellanies (1783–4), 3 vols. Volume ii is dated 1783, volumes i and iii 1784. Davies’s critical observations and his anecdotes are arranged in chapters on individual Shakespeare plays, Every Man in his Humour, Nathaniel Lee’s Alexander the Great, and Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, and on individual playwrights, including Jonson. Many passing comments on Jonson, and a great deal of material on eighteenth-century performances of Jonson, have been omitted here. For Davies, see No. 173, above; and see Introduction, pp. 30, 32. (a) From chapter 21, on All’s Well that Ends Well. Ben Jonson was not averse to the use of the characters and language of comedy in his tragedies; but Ben understood not the art of blending them so happily as not to destroy the effect of either. In his Sejanus, he introduces a scene between the principal character of the play and Eudemus the physician. Sejanus gravely interrogates the doctor concerning the effect of the physic he administers to the ladies, his patients, and is anxious to know which of them, during the operation, made the most wry faces: this is below farce. — Nay, so lost is this learned author to all sense of decency and decorum, that Catiline, in the grand scene of conspirators, in Act III. threatens one of his young associates with the severest punishment for his reluctance to submit to the most infamous of all crimes! (ii, 24–5) (b) From chapter 23.

[On Every Man in his Humour.] Every Man in his Humour is founded on such follies and passions as are perpetually incident to, and connected with, man’s nature; such as do not depend upon local custom or change of fashion; and, for that reason, will bid fair to last as long as many of our old comedies. The language of Jonson is very peculiar; in perspicuity and elegance he is inferior to Beaumont and Fletcher, and very unlike the masculine dialogue of Massinger. It is almost needless to observe that he comes far short of the variety, strength, and natural flow, of Shakspeare. To avoid the common idiom, he plunges into stiff, quaint, and harsh, phraseology: he has borrowed more words, from the Latin tongue, than all the authors of his time. However, the style of this play, as well as that of the Alchemist and

560 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Silent Woman, is more disentangled and free from foreign auxiliaries than the greatest part of his works. Most of the characters are truly dramatic: Kitely, though not equal to Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, who can plead a more justifiable cause of jealousy, is yet well conceived, and is placed so artfully in situation, as to draw forth a considerable share of comic distress. Bobadil is an original. The coward, assuming the dignity of calm courage, was, I believe, new to our stage; at least, I can remember nothing like him. From Bobadil, Congreve formed his Noll Bluff; a part most admirably acted by Ben Jonson the comedian. Master Stephen is an honester object of ridicule than master Slender. One is nature’s oaf, consequently rather an object of compassion than scorn. The other is a fop of fashion, and the gulled imitator of the follies which he admires in his companions. Clement and Downright are strongly marked with humour, especially the first; and Brainworm is a fellow of merry and arch contrivance. In drawing this character, I believe the author had Terence, or rather, Plautus, of whom he was acknowledged to be an imitator, in his eye. Wellbred and young Knowell are distinguished by no peculiarities. Old Knowell is something like the anxious Simo of Terence.1 (ii, 53–5) [On the prologue to the play in the 1616 folio.] Jonson collected his works into one volume in the same year, and took that opportunity of indulging his posthumous malice, by fixing this introduction to his first play. This is of a piece with his general conduct through his whole life to Shakspeare. When he sat down to write a panegyric on his beloved, prefixed to his works, as he there calls Shakspeare, he must, for a time, have purged his brain and heart of all spleen, envy, and malevolence: for a more accurate or extensive eulogium, on the genius and writings of Shakspeare, could not well be conceived, (ii, 58–9) [On Every Man out of his Humour:] This piece has, in my opinion, a great share of comic pleasantry, and, with some judicious alterations, would now afford rational amusement. Some of the characters, it is true, are obsolete through age; others, such as the Envious Man and the Parasite, are of all times and all nations. Macilente and Carlo Buffone will last till doomsday: they are admirably well drawn. The objection of Dr. Hurd, who terms the play a hard delineation of a groupe of simply-existing passions, wholly chimerical, is ill-founded. Some of these parts are to be seen now in some shape or other; fashionable shadows of foppery and custom vary with times and circumstances. Who does not see every day a Sogliardo and Fungoso, differently modified, in our metropolis at this instant? In a rude unpolished age, when the people were just emancipated from barbarism by the renovation of literature and the light of reformation, a groupe of new and absurd characters must naturally spring up which would furnish ample materials of ridicule to the comic writers; and who can deny that Jonson has, in this play, laid hold of many growing follies of the times in which he lived? With submission to so justly-celebrated a writer as Dr. Hurd, I would ask, what is it that constitutes character? Is it not that distinguished passion, or peculiar humour, which separates a man from the rest of his species? Characters are formed from manners, and these are derived from passions. When they are indulged to a certain distinguishing degree, so as to make a man ridiculous or remarkable, we then call him a character. The

BEN JONSON 561

Muses’ Looking-Glass cannot be paralelled with Every Man in his Humour; because in this we have action, which the other wants. Jonson has, in one part, delineated a character which did not exist perhaps in that full force in his own days, and with such eclat and additional force from certain circumstances, as it has done since. Many striking features of Carlo Buffone will, if I mistake not, be acknowledged to have existed in a late shining comic genius. Let us read Buffone’s character given by Cordato: [Quotes EMO, Induction, ll. 356–64.] (ii, 74–6) ⋆⋆⋆ The Poetaster, notwithstanding the author’s predilection for it, is one of Jonson’s lowest productions: it was conceived in malice and brought forth in anger. It is indeed a contemptible mixture of the serio-comic, where the names of Augustus Cæsar, Mecænas, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Tibullus, are all sacrificed upon the altar of private resentment. The translations from the classics are meanly literal, as well as harsh and quaint, and far inferior to those of Chapman, or any other translator of those times. Jonson’s Tucca is a wretched copy, or ape, of the inimitable Falstaff. This comical satire, as it is called, closes with an apologetical address to the reader, stuffed with farther abuse upon the players, with a slender exception in favour of some better natures amongst them. There is nothing so remarkable in this dialogue as the author’s arrogance. After having laboured most strenuously to give proofs of his importance, in a kind of poetic rapture, he thrusts his friends from him, by telling them, ‘He will try if Tragedy have a more kind aspect, for her favours he will next pursue’. We must suppose, then, that he was in labour of his great Sejanus. By the mediation of friends, and most likely by the good-offices of our gentle Shakspeare, a reconciliation was effected between this surly writer and the comedians. (ii, 82–3) (c) From chapter 24.

[On Sejanus:] Ben, notwithstanding, greatly valued himself upon this tragedy. Let any candid judge examine it with the second or third rate tragedies of Shakspeare, and he will find it far inferior to the spirit that reigns in the worst of them. If, in his historical pieces, our admirable bard is sometimes blameable for overloading his scenes with multiplicity of business, and with incidents undramatic, Ben Jonson, in the selection of historical events, is far less happy than his rival. The speeches of his principal characters are long and tedious, and neither interesting from sentiment, passion, or business. His translations from the classics are tiresome and disgusting, and retard, rather than forward, the progress of the play. When the tragedy is brought, by the death of Sejanus, to its proper period, (and which is pompously and too circumstantially related from Juvenal,) the curtain is not suffered to fall till you are tortured with, what might have been well spared, an odious relation of the cruel deaths of his young son, and his daughter, a child who is first vitiated by the common executioner, to be made a legal victim of justice to the state. This man, the frequenter of courts, the scholar of Camden,

562 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

the friend of Selden, and the companion of Sir Harry Savile, had no knowledge of decorum and decency. But, that I may not be thought to view this author’s writings with a partial malignity, let me candidly confess there is something noble and affecting in the defence of Silius, whose voluntary death in the senate is striking and truly dramatic; that Tiberius’s dissembled knowledge of Sejanus’s designs, with his employing Macro to check the pride and insolence of his minion, are masterly touched; and the fine soliloquy of Sejanus, in which he enumerates the slaughter of his enemies, cannot be too much applauded. (ii, 86–7) [On Catiline:] Jonson has, besides, placed Catiline in such situations, and given sentiments so correspondent to his ambitious and savage mind, that a good actor could not fail to improve them to the delight of an intelligent audience. But, when we allow all this, and more, Catiline, upon the whole, is a very languid and tedious entertainment. Nothing but a very strong prepossession in the author’s favour could have induced an audience to hear with patience the speeches of Cicero, which, bating the interruptions of a line or two, are extended to the immeasurable length of one hundred and seventy lines. A great deal of Sallust, and almost the whole of Cicero’s Catilinarian orations, are translated verbally. This, in Jonson’s age, was more unnecessary perhaps than in our own: the classics were in every body’s hands. The last editors of Shakspeare have, with singular diligence, given a list of all the translations from the Greek and Roman authors published in the reigns of Elizabeth and James; and it is almost astonishing to think what floods of science and learning were poured in from these classic fountains. The part of Cicero must have been an intolerable burden to an actor of Stentorian lungs, unless the orations were considerably curtailed. Major Mohun, who is celebrated by my Lord Rochester for the wonder of actors, rejected Cicero, and took a much shorter part, that of Cethegus, his acting of which the same nobleman much applauds. The manners of this play are, in one place particularly, more censurable than those of Sejanus. In the grand meeting of the conspirators, one of them, by action, tempts a young lad to submit to his infamous passion; upon his unwillingness to comply, Catiline threatens him with instant death if he persists to refuse gratifying the other’s more than brutal inclination. This, I suppose, Ben would call the truth of history and highly characteristical. But surely he must have read and translated Horace’s Art of Poetry with little taste who could be guilty of such indecency. Jonson’s women are, in general, disagreeable company; they are vicious and vulgar, and make the author smell too much of low company and the brothel. We have indeed one modest Celia, and my good Dame Kitely, to counterbalance his large number of rampant ladies. The scene, in Catiline, between Curius and Fulvia, by the conduct of which the conspiracy is brought to light, is naturally imagined and dramatically conducted. —Jonson, by his knowledge of Roman manners, customs, attires, &c. avoids tolerably well the common fault of our old dramatists, who are sure to travel with the manners of our metropolis to all parts of the globe. (ii, 89–92) ⋆⋆⋆ [Quotes Digges on the relative popularity of Shakespeare and Jonson, ll. 49–59 and ll. 45–7 from No. 38, above.]

BEN JONSON 563

And this seems to be a fair and just account of the regard in which Jonson was generally held. He was never supported by the public voice, though kept alive by the critics and the excellent performance of the actors. He had bullied the authors of his own times into an extraordinary opinion of his vast merit; and, when he died, he left such a frown behind him, that he frightened all succeeding dramatic poets and critics, who were afraid to censure, what, in their hearts, they neither admired nor approved. I have already given my opinion that some of our leading nobility, and other court critics, made it their business to stimulate the players to revive their favourite author, though, I am persuaded, the greatest part of the audiences had no appetite for him. The duke of Buckingham has found room in his Rehearsal to give praise to Ben Jonson,2 though he no where mentions Shakspeare. But the duke, it seems, conversed with Ben when his grace was a boy of about thirteen, and the poet was near his grand climacterique, and thence conceived such a veneration for him, that it never left him afterwards. It was a constant complaint of the old actors, who lived in Queen Anne’s time, that if Jonson’s plays were intermitted for a few years, they could not know how to personate his characters, they were so difficult, and their manners so distant, from those of all other authors. To preserve them required a kind of stage learning, which was traditionally hoarded up. Mosca, in Volpone, when he endeavours to work upon the avarice of Corvino, and to induce him to offer his wife to the pretendedly sick voluptuary, pronounces the word think, seven or eight times: there is a difficulty arises here in various pause and difference of sound. Many niceties of this kind were observed by the old comedians, which are now absolutely lost to the stage. (ii, 93–5) (d) From chapter 25.

[On Volpone:] The fable of Volpone is chosen with judgement, and is founded upon avarice and luxury. The paying obsequious and constant courtship to childless rich people, with a view to obtain from them bountiful legacies in return, has been a practice of all times, and in all nations. ⋆⋆⋆ In the comedy of The Fox, there is not much to be censured, except the language, which is so pedantic and stuck so full of Latinity, that few, except the learned, can perfectly understand it. ‘Jonson’, says Dr. Young, ‘brought all the antients upon his head: by studying to speak like a Roman, he forgot the language of his country.’3 The conduct of the plot in the first four acts, except the mountebank scene, is truly admirable. The last act is, in my opinion, quite farcical. That a man of Volpone’s sagacity should venture to appear in public, in the disguise of a mountebank, to be an eye-witness of a lady’s beauty, of which he had heard only from report, and after escaping from the apprehended consequences of this exorbitant frolic, which had brought him within the censure of a court of judicature, upon the bare declaration of the judges in his favour, and against those he had caused to be unjustly accused; that he should again assume another shape, that of an apparitor or tipstaff; make a pretended will; leave all his money, jewels, and effects, pretendedly to so wretched a fellow as a pimp and parasite; and all this with no other view than to mortify, insult, and abuse, those whom he had gulled, while yet the sentence of the court was depending, is a matter as absurd and improbable as any thing acted at the Italian comedy. (ii, 98–9)

564 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

[On Epicoene:] Mr. Dryden, in his Essay on dramatic Poetry, has given a very advantageous character of this play. After all the panegyric bestowed upon it, the play is of that number which needs much forgiveness, if it really has a title to much commendation. The great licentiousness of its dialogue was no obstacle to its success when originally performed; nor, in the reign of Charles II. when revived. But, as the age advanced in decency of manners, the less could the Silent Woman be tolerated. When it was revived, about thirty years since, under the management of Mr. Garrick, with perseverance it was dragged on for a few nights. The managers acquired neither profit nor reputation by the exhibition of it. Some expressions met with severe marks of the spectators displeasure. The character of Morose, upon whose peevish and perverse humour the plot of the comedy depends, is that of a whimsical recluse, whose disposition can bear no sound but that which he utters himself. If this were the whole of his character, he would still be a good object for comic satire, but the melancholy of Morose degenerates into malice and cruelty. In extreme old age, to disinherit a worthy young man, his nephew, he enters into the bonds of matrimony. The schemes therefore which are contrived to disturb his repose and torment his mind, are proper medicines for such a man, and justified by the strictest morality. But, besides the licentiousness of the manners, and quaintness of expression, in the Silent Woman, the frequent allusions to forgotten customs and characters render it impossible to be ever revived with any probability of success. To understand Jonson’s comedies perfectly, we should have before us a satirical history of the age in which he lived. I question whether the diligence of Mr. Steevens and Mr. Malone could dig up a very complete explanation of this author’s allusions. Mr. Colman, after all the pains and skill he could bestow on this comedy, found that it was labour lost; there was no reviving the dead. The audience were as much disgusted with Jonson’s old ruffs and bands, as the wits of James I. were with Hyeronimo’s old cloak and the Spanish tragedy. It must yet be confessed, that the gentlemen of this comedy, though perhaps too learned for the present day, converse with an easy gaiety and liberal familiarity, superior to any of this writer’s productions. In the first act there is a sonnet, which, for the vivacity and elegance of its turn of thought, I cannot forbear transcribing: [Quotes the song from Act I (1.1.91–102).] (ii, 101–3) [On The Alchemist:] This play is, I think equal to any of this author’s, in plot, character, and comic satire. The catastrophe is surely a bad one; a gentleman of fortune joining with his knavish servant, to cheat a parcel of bubbles of their money and goods, is equally mean and immoral. This play kept possession of the stage long after the imposture it was written to detect had ceased. It is worked up with amazing art; and, as its foundation is laid in avarice and imposition, it affords a groupe of comic characters and variety of stage-business. However, it must be owned, that, for these last forty years, it has been supported by the action of a favourite Abel Drugger. Mr. Garrick freed the stage from the false spirit, ridiculous squinting, and vile grimace, which, in Theophilus Cibber, had captivated the public for several years, by introducing a more natural manner of displaying the absurdities of a foolish tobacconist. At the same time, justice calls upon us to allow, that the simplicity of Weston almost exceeded the fine art of a Garrick, whose numberless excellences may

BEN JONSON 565

spare a tribute of praise to this genuine child of nature. I cannot omit, in this place, to observe, that Mr. Garrick, by his own authority, intrenched upon the part of Kastril, acted incomparably by Mr. Yates, in the 4th act of the play; for the challenging of Surly, and driving him off the stage, belongs properly to the angry boy, and not to Abel, who, instead of being an auxiliary, took the field to himself. (ii, 107–8) NOTES 1 In The Woman of Andros. 2 In Act II, Scene i; The Rehearsal, ed D.E.L.Crane (Durham 1976), p. 16. 3 See No 148, above.

566

177. George Colman, Jonson’s intentions in The Sad Shepherd 1784

From an unsigned review of Francis Waldron’s 1783 continuation of The Sad Shepherd, in The Monthy Review (1784), lxx. For Colman, see No. 171, above. The fragment of the Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson, like the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, is a stronger proof of the poetical genius, than of the dramatic art of its author. Fletcher’s Pastoral Dialogue was condemned on its first representation; and, though afterwards revived by royal sunshine, soon languished again, and fell into decay upon the stage. Contemporary poets, and succeeding critics, have reprobated the tasteless age, that listened, with the ears of Midas, to the work of Apollo; yet the continued neglect of that pastoral, which no one has attempted to restore to the theatre, seems to have ratified the original sentence of its inefficience as a drama, however excellent it may appear as a poem. Had Jonson ever put the last hand to the Sad Shepherd its fate would most probably be similar; for that it was destined to the stage, we cannot, with the present editor, consider as doubtful. The prologue testifies its intended representation. ⋆⋆⋆ The author of the work before us discovers, in his continuation, as well as in his notes and appendix, an intimate acquaintance with the productions of our old English poets. His continuation, of which he speaks so modestly, is by no means contemptible; though we think it, in point of style, as well as conduct, liable to exception. The language, duly allowing for the obsolete cast of it, is easy and flowing; but rather in the manner of Allan Ramsay, than of Jonson. In speaking of the fable, we would not wish to ‘turn what should be grave to farce;’ yet we could not help observing on the perusal, that it seemed to be constructed too nearly on the principles of the Humane Society. The whole doctrine of the recovery of persons, that appear to be drowned, is so clearly laid down, and we are inspired with such early hopes of the revival of Æglamour, that we are in little or no pain for this voluntary lover’s leap into the Trent. The rest of the incidents also are, in our opinion, still more foreign to the manner, and probable intention, of Jonson. Even the new part of the third act is not, as the continuator professes, ‘written agreeably to the plan laid down by Jonson.’ His argument to the third act gives no authority for the scene of Robin Hood’s bower in the continuation, containing the loves of Amie and Karolin, Lionel and Mellifleur. The remainder of the piece strays, we think, still wider from the tract of the original. The sternness and severity of Old Ben accords but ill with the overflowing goodnature of the imitator, whose chief wish seems to have been to promote the present and

568 BEN JONSON

future happiness of all his personages, by reforming every body, and marrying every body. All the characters, good or evil, ordinary or preternatural, had Jonson completed the piece, would probably have been continued, as they were begun, to the conclusion, according to the precept of his master Horace; and the knot of the drama, if we may judge from the hint in his list of persons, would have been united by Reuben, the Reconciler. According to a similar hint in the same list, we may conclude that Maudlin, Douce, Lorell, and Puck Hairy, would have sustained their original characters, and have constantly appeared, as The Troubles unexpected. The notes and appendix, though rambling and desultory, contain many sensible and judicious observations, and much curious matter; particularly the extracts from the ‘old prose morality of William Bulleyn,’ as well as the quotations from ‘the poems of Robert Southwell.’ From the dedication to Mr. King, and from some extravagant encomiums on other living performers at our theatres, we should conclude the author himself to be an humble retainer to the stage. His work, however, in spite of some peculiarities, abounds with instruction and entertainment; and we think him entitled, like the old comedians, to take leave with an invocation of favour and applause, Valete, et plaudite1. (lxx, 48–51)

NOTE 1 ‘Farewell, and applaud.’

178. Richard Cumberland on Jonson 1786–8

From volumes iii and iv of Cumberland’s five-volume collection of essays, The Observer (1785–91). Volume iii appeared in 1786, volume iv in 1788. Text from the fourth edition (1791). Cumberland (1732–1811), a prolific dramatist and a novelist, made his name with The Brothers (1769), The West Indian (1771), and The Fashionable Lover (1772), each in its turn a notable stage success. After Cambridge he had been private secretary to Lord Halifax, President of the Board of Trade, and later (1775) he was appointed Secretary to the Board. In other references to Jonson in The Observer, Cumberland concludes that Jonson treated audiences ‘with the dictatorial haughtiness of a pedant’, while Shakespeare treated his ‘with the carelessness of a gentleman who wrote at his ease’ (iii, 231); he quotes from the witches in Macbeth and The Masque of Queens to show that ‘Jonson dwells upon authorities without fancy, Shakespeare employs fancy and creates authorities’ (iii, 139–47); and he prints parallel passages from the ‘Song To Celia’ and Philostratus’ Epistles to show that Jonson had been ‘poaching’ (iv, 136–8). (a) From no. 3. When I compare the state of flattery in a free country with that, which obtains in arbitrary states, it is a consolation to find that this mean principle is not natural to mankind; for it certainly abates in proportion as independency advances. This will be very evident to any one, who compares the flattery of Elizabeth’s and James’s days with the present. Ben Johnson for instance was a surly poet, yet how fulsome are his masques! In his News from the New World he says of James— ‘Read him as you would do the book Of all perfections, and but look What his proportions be: No measure that is thence contriv’d, Or any motion thence deriv’d, But is pure harmony.’ [ll. 340–5] This poet, though he was rather a clumsy flatterer of his prince, was ingenious enough in the mode he took for flattering himself, by introducing a kind of chorus, wherein he takes occasion to tell his hearers, that careless of all vulgar censure, as not depending on common approbation, he is confident his plays shall super-please judicious spectators, and to them he leaves it to work with the rest by example, or otherwise. It is remarkable that this passage should be

570 BEN JONSON

found in his Magnetic Lady [Induction, ll. 122–5], and that he should speak with such confidence of one of his worst productions, as if he was determined to force a bad comedy upon the hearers by the authority of his own recommendation. This is an evident imitation of Aristophanes, who in his comedy of The Clouds holds the same language to his audience, fairly telling them he shall estimate their judgment according to the degree of applause they shall bestow upon his performance then before them: in conclusion he inveighs against certain of his contemporaries, Eupolis, Phrynichus, and Hermippus, with whose comedies if any of his audience is well pleased, that person he hopes will depart from his dissatisfied; but if they condemn his rivals, and applaud him, he shall think better of their judgment for the future. Act 1. Sc. 6. [ll. 518–62] (iii, 20–2) (b) From no. 20.

In modern times the philosopher’s stone seems to have been found by our adventurers in the East, where beggars have become princes and princes have become beggars; if Ben Johnson was now living, could he have painted these upstart voluptuaries more to the life, than by the following animated description? [Quotes an abridged version of Alch. 2.2.41–96.] These are strong colours; and though he has dipped his pencil pretty liberally into the pallet of the ancients, he has finely mixed the composition with tints of his own; to speak in the same figure, we may say of this sketch, that it is in the very best stile of the master. (iii, 187–9) (c) From no. 86.

[On Pistol:] Shakespear founded his bully in parody, Jonson copied his from nature, and the palm seems due to Bobadil upon a comparison with Pistol; Congreve copied a very happy likeness from Jonson, and by the fairest and most laudable imitation produced his Noll Bluff, one of the pleasantest humourists on the comic stage. (iii, 246) (d) From no. 110

novis.1

Usus vetusto genere, sed rebus PROLOG. PHAED[RUS] FAB[ULAE]. lib. [i]v. [l. 13] BEN JONSON in his prologue to the comedy of The Fox says that he wrote it in the short space of five weeks, his words are— To these there needs no lie but this his creature, Which was two months since no feature; And tho’ he dares give them five lives to mend it, ’Tis known five weeks fully penn’d it. [ll. 13–16] This he delivers in his usual vaunting stile, spurning at the critics and detractors of his day, who thought to convict him of dulness by testifying in fact to his diligence. The magic movements of Shakespear’s muse had been so noted and applauded for their surprising rapidity, that the public had contracted a very ridiculous respect for hasty productions in general, and thought there could be no better test of a poet’s genius than the dispatch and

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 571

facility with which he wrote; Jonson therefore affects to mark his contempt of the public judgment for applauding hasty writers in the couplet preceding those above quoted— And when his plays come out, think they can flout ’em With saying, He was a year about them. [ll. 11–12] But at the same time that he shews this contempt very justly, he certainly betrays a degree of weakness in boasting of his poetical dispatch, and seems to forget that he had noted Shakespear with something less than friendly censure for the very quality, he is vaunting himself upon. Several comic poets since his age have seemed to pride themselves on the little time they expended on their productions; some have had the artifice to hook it in as an excuse for their errors, but it is no less evident what share vanity has in all such apologies: Wycherley is an instance amongst these, and Congreve tells of his expedition in writing the Old Bachelor, yet the same man afterwards in his letter to Mr. Dryden pompously pronounces that to write one perfect comedy should be the labour of one entire life produced from a concentration of talents, which hardly ever met in any human person.2 After all it will be confessed that the production of such a drama as The Fox in the space of five weeks is a very wonderful performance; for it must on all hands be considered as the master-piece of a very capital artist, a work, that bears the stamp of elaborate design, a strong and frequently a sublime vein of poetry, much sterling wit, comic humour, happy character, moral satire and unrivalled erudition; a work— Quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis Annorum series et fuga temporum.3 In this drama the learned reader will find himself for ever treading upon classic ground; the foot of the poet is so fitted and familiarized to the Grecian sock, that he wears it not with the awkwardness of an imitator, but with all the easy confidence and authoritative air of a privileged Athenian: Exclusive of Aristophanes, in whose volume he is perfect, it is plain that even the gleanings and broken fragments of the Greek stage had not escaped him; in the very first speech of Volpone’s, which opens the comedy, in which he rapturously addresses himself to his treasure, he is to be traced most decidedly in the fragments of Menander, Sophocles and Euripides, in Thèognis and in Hesiod, not to mention Horace. To follow him through every one would be tedious, and therefore I will give a sample of one passage only; Volpone is speaking to his gold— Thou being the best of things and far transcending All stile of joy in children, parents, friends— Thy looks when they to Venus did ascribe, They should have given her twenty thousand Cupids, Such are thy beauties and our loves— [1.1.16–21] Let the curious reader compare this with the following fragment of Euripides’s Bellerophon and he will find it almost a translation.

572 BEN JONSON

Cicero made a selection of passages from the Greek dramatic authors, which he turned into Latin verse for the purpose of applying them, as occasion should offer, either in his writings or pleadings, and our learned countryman seems on his part to have made the whole circle of Greek and Roman poets his own and naturalized them to our stage. If any learned man would employ his leisure in following his allusions through his comedy only, I should think it would be no unentertaining task. The Fox is indubitably the best production of it’s author, and in some points of substantial merit yields to nothing, which the English stage can oppose to it; there is a bold and happy spirit in the fable, it is of moral tendency, female chastity and honour are beautifully displayed and punishment is inflicted on the delinquents of the drama with strict and exemplary justice: The characters of the Hæredipetæ,5 depicted under the titles of birds of prey, Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino, are warmly coloured, happily contrasted and faithfully supported from the outset to the end: Volpone, who gives his name to the piece, with a fox-like craftiness deludes and gulls their hopes by the agency of his inimitable Parasite, or (as the Greek and Roman authors expressed it) by his Fly, his Mosca; and in this finished portrait Jonson may throw the gauntlet to the greatest masters of antiquity; the character is of classic origin; it is found with the contemporaries of Aristophanes, though not in any comedy of his now existing; the Middle Dramatists seem to have handled it very frequently, and in the New Comedy it rarely failed to find a place; Plautus has it again and again, but the aggregate merit of all his Parasites will not weigh in the scale against this single Fly of our poet: The incident of his concealing Bonario in the gallery, from whence he breaks in upon the scene to the rescue of Celia and the detection of Volpone, is one of the happiest contrivances, which could possibly be devised, because at the same time that it produces the catastrophe, it does not sacrifice Mosca’s character in the manner most villains are sacrificed in comedy by making them commit blunders, which do not correspond with the address their first representation exhibits and which the audience has a right to expect from them throughout, of which the Double Dealer [by Congreve] is amongst others a notable instance. But this incident of Bonario’s interference does not only not impeach the adroitness of the Parasite, but it furnishes a very brilliant occasion for setting off his ready invention and presence of mind in a new and superior light, and serves to introduce the whole machinery of the trial and condemnation of the innocent persons before the court of Advocates: In this part of the fable the contrivance is inimitable, and here the poet’s art is a study, which every votarist of the dramatic muses ought to pay attention and respect to; had the same address been exerted throughout, the construction would have been a matchless piece of art, but here we are to lament the haste of which he boasts in his prologue, and that rapidity of composition, which he appeals to as a mark of genius, is to be lamented as the probable cause of incorrectness, or at least the best and most candid plea in excuse of it: For who can deny that nature is violated by the absurdity of Volpone’s unseasonable insults to the very persons, who had witnessed falsely in his defence, and even to the very Advocate, who had so successfully defended him? Is it in character for a man of his deep cunning and long reach of thought to provoke those, on whom his all depended, to retaliate upon him, and this for the poor triumph of a silly jest? Certainly this is a glaring defect, which every body must lament, and which can escape nobody. The poet himself knew the weak part of his plot and vainly strives to bolster it up by making Volpone exclaim against his own folly— I am caught in my own noose— [5.10.13–14] And again— To make a snare for mine own neck, and run

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 573

My head into it wilfully with laughter! When I had newly ’scap’d, was free and clear, Out of mere wantonness! Oh, the dull devil Was in this brain of mine, when I devis’d it, And Mosca gave it second— —These are my fine conceits! I must be merry, with a mischief to me! What a vile wretch was I, that cou’d not bear My fortune soberly! I must have my crotchets, And my conundrums! — [5.11.1–6, 13–17] It is with regret I feel myself compelled to protest against so pleasant an episode, as that which is carried on by Sir Politic Wou’d-be and Peregrine, which in fact produces a kind of double plot and catastrophe; this is an imperfection in the fable, which criticism cannot overlook, but Sir Politic is altogether so delightful a fellow, that it is impossible to give a vote for his exclusion; the most that can be done against him is to lament that he has not more relation to the main business of the fable. The judgment pronounced upon the criminals in the conclusion of the play is so just and solemn, that I must think the poet has made a wanton breach of character and gained but a sorry jest by the bargain, when he violates the dignity of his court of judges by making one of them so abject in his flattery to the Parasite upon the idea of matching him with his daughter, when he hears that Volpone has made him his heir; but this is an objection, that lies within the compass of two short lines, spoken aside from the bench, and may easily be remedied by their omission in representation; it is one only, and that a very slight one, amongst those venial blemishes— —quas incuria fudit.6

It does not occur to me that any other remark is left for me to make upon this celebrated drama, that could convey the slightest censure; but very many might be made in the highest strain of commendation, if there was need of any more than general testimony to such acknowledged merit. The Fox is a drama of so peculiar a species, that it cannot be dragged into a comparison with the production of any other modern poet whatsoever; it’s construction is so dissimilar from any thing of Shakespear’s writing, that it would be going greatly out of our way, and a very gross abuse of criticism to attempt to settle the relative degrees of merit, where the characters of the writers are so widely opposite: In one we may respect the profundity of learning, in the other we must admire the sublimity of genius; to one we pay the tribute of understanding, to the other we surrender up the possession of our hearts; Shakespear with ten thousand spots about him dazzles us with so bright a lustre, that we either cannot or will not see his faults; he gleams and flashes like a meteor, which shoots out of our sight before the eye can measure it’s proportions, or analyse it’s properties—but Jonson stands still to be surveyed, and presents so bold a front, and levels it so fully to our view, as seems to challenge the compass and the rule of the critic, and defy him to find out an error in the scale and composition of his structure. Putting aside therefore any further mention of Shakespear, who was a poet out of all rule, and beyond all compass of criticism, one whose excellencies are above comparison, and his errors beyond number, I will venture an opinion that this drama of The Fox is,

574 BEN JONSON

critically speaking, the nearest to perfection of any one drama, comic or tragic, which the English stage is at this day in possession of. (iv, 147–56) NOTES 1 ‘Using the old form but treating new themes’. 2 Congreve, letter to Dennis, in Dennis’s Letters On Several Occasions (1695), p. 95. 3 ‘One that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless chain of years and the ages’ flight’: Horace, Odes, 3.30.3–5. 4 ‘O gold, most wonderful gift to mankind, a mother does not have such pleasures, nor are children or a dear father such pleasure to mankind; and if Aphrodite sees a thing like that in the eyes, it is no wonder that she creates thousands of loves’: Euripides, Fragmenta, 324. 5 ‘Legacy-hunters’. 6 ‘Which a careless hand has let drop’: Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 352.

179. Henry Sampson Woodfall, Jun., Jonson’s vain contention with Shakespeare 1788

From the prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King, altered by Thomas Harris. The revival took place at Covent Garden on 14 January. Text from The European Magazine (1788), xiii. Woodfall (1739–1805) was also responsible for prologues to Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Midnight Hour and her All on a Summer’s Day (both 1787). He took over The Public Advertiser from his father in 1758 and continued to be responsible for it until 1793; the letters by ‘Junius’ attacking the crown appeared in its columns. To equal Shakespeare vainly Jonson tried, Nor classic lore avail’d, nor critic pride. In vain his scenes as rules direct he rear’d, In vain his various characters appear’d: By Humour’s hand in glowing tints pourtray’d, While quaint Quotation lent her learned aid; Genius for Shakespeare bore a willing part, And Nature triumph’d o’er contending Art. The fabric thus by human efforts rais’d, Admir’d for grandeur, and for firmness prais’d; Yet boasts not firmness to withstand the rage Of whirlwinds, flames, and undermining age. While the vast rock, by nature form’d, defies Successive ages, and inclement skies: The whirlwind’s fury without danger braves, And sternly frowns upon the roaring waves; And mountains raise their hoary heads sublime In Heav’n, nor die but with the death of Time. Beaumont and Fletcher nearest Shakespeare came In wit, in genius, in dramatic fame. To please the judgment while they charm’d the heart, With Shakespeare’s fire they blended Jonson’s art. But the rude joke, for modest ears unfit, (The porter’s pleasure, and the carman’s wit) Too oft each comic character exprest, Nor blush’d the audience at th’ indecent jest:

576 BEN JONSON

While we, more nice, because more knowing grown, To find allusions never meant too prone, At ev’ry grossness feel a gen’rous rage, And hoot the graceless ribbald from the stage. (ll. 30–59; xiii, 105)

180. Philip Neve on Jonson 1789

From his Cursory Remarks On Some Of the Ancient English Poets, Particularly Milton (1789). Neve also wrote A Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s Coffin (1790), and was an important early Milton scholar; little is known of his life. JONSON Of Ben Jonson, who died in 1637, though justly allowed a great scholar and perfect master of dramatic rule, there are not many pieces, among all the volumes he has left, that can be pointed out to a reader of taste, for his amusement, or approbation. As a dramatist, it seems to have been his fault, that he studied books, where he should have studied men. Every Man in his Humour, a comedy, in which Shakspeare used to act; the description of the battle, at the conclusion of Catiline; the imperfect drama of the Sad Shepherd, or, Tale of Robinhood; and the Alchymist, seem to form the chief mass of his poetic beauties. In the first act of the Sad Shepherd, the death of Earine is related with a fancy and assemblage of poetical images, scarcely any where equalled: nor is this the only beauty of the piece. Yet so fatally did books associate with all combinations in Jonson’s mind, that he has, two pages afterwards, made his shepherds read Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and other Greek romances. Of the Alchymist the fame is indeed deservedly established. The course of human events affords few juster subjects for the drama, than the censure of superstitious practices and opinions, and the ridicule of popular errors. As such follies tend to the subversion of true philosophy, a pen that, like Jonson’s, holds them up to derision, is very commendably employed in the cause of truth. Chaucer’s Chanones Yemannes Tale had, long before, struck a hard blow at the pretenders to the philosopher’s stone: which tale, it appears in Jonson’s text, he had consulted in forming his drama. That the opinion of transmuting and multiplying metals was fixed in the general belief, at the time when Jonson wrote this play, is commonly known: but it has its merit not from that circumstance only, and as a satire of temporary application alone; it is, and will be, a satire of distinguished excellence, as long as this deep and rooted persuasion of a philosopher’s stone shall any where exist. Whilst reason shall be insufficient for all the purposes of conviction to the human mind, it will perhaps be quite hopeless that superstition and vain opinions should be wholly eradicated: and, as long as the passions shall prevail against any of the cardinal constituents of virtue, avarice will follow them, or rather a greedy thirst after a source to supply their enormities. This fondness therefore for the opinion of transmutation is not likely to be the

578 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

last folly, that will die; and, as long as it shall exist, the application of the Alchymist will remain. Of the characters, Sir Epicure Mammon is excellently chosen: a glutton and debauchee, whose judgment is weakened by his passions, and who thereby becomes a fit subject to be the dupe of Subtle, and, his helpmate, Face. Jonson’s play was first acted in the year 1610; and, four years afterwards, was performed by the scholars of Trinity-College, Cambridge, before the King, a comedy, entitled Albumazar (an astrologer): a play, of which the plot is excellently contrived, conducted with a variety of entertaining incidents, and brought to a just and perfect conclusion. The restitution of Antonio’s goods by Albumazar impeaching the thieves, renders the conclusion of this piece more perfect, than that of Jonson’s Alchymist, where Face keeps his gains. (39–42)

181. Ludwig Tieck on Shakespeare and Jonson 1794

Translated from Das Buch über Shakespeare, ed. Henry Lüdeke (Halle 1920). Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) was a leading light in the early Romantic movement in Germany, and a prolific writer and critic. He had planned from early in his career to write a book on Shakespeare, but never completed it. The following extracts are translated from the commentary on Shakespeare that the editor of Tieck’s papers on Shakespeare, Henry Lüdeke, dates about 1794. Tieck’s interest in Jonson was second only to his interest in Shakespeare; in 1793 he had adapted Volpone for the German stage, the play being first published in Berlin in 1798 under the title Ein Schurke über den andern, oder die Fuchsprelle (‘One Rascal against Another, or The Baiting of the Fox’). Walther Fischer, ‘Zu Ludwig Tiecks elisabethanischen Studien: Tieck als Ben Jonson-Philologe’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (1926), lxii, 130, records that between 1793 and 1817 Tieck went through Jonson’s work systematically, once in Whalley’s text and twice in Gifford’s. In his Briefe über Shakespeare, first published in Das Poetisches Journal (1800), Tieck describes his fascination with Jonson as the great alternative to Shakespeare, demonstrating in his ‘strange, almost painfully exact works’ ‘the most complete example of the unfolding of a false trail’ in the drama (Tieck, Kritische Schriften (Leipzig 1848–52), i, 183–4). See Introduction, pp. 33–4. (a) From the note on Falstaff in the commentary on Henry IV, Part 1. Shakespeare created his characters directly from Nature and from his genius, so that they have always a grace which is lacking in the creations of most poets, we love them always, however faulty they may be, just because the poet was closer to Nature. Jonson’s characters always remain a little base; they betray study of the ancients, one notices his attention to other works, his practice of abstraction from them, and for that reason remains colder and less drawn into illusion. (163–4) (b) From the general comment on The Merchant of Venice.

The age was so lacking in delicacy that the far more modest geniuses Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, and Chapman ventured other kinds of curiosities, depicting the strangest characters, the most peculiar events: Beaumont mixes the comic and the serious in the most untoward way, Jonson’s comedies often consist of intricacies created from the strangest occurrences and the grossest caricatures. His better plays have more the merit of a good plot, than of finely nuanced characters. (178)

580 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

(c) From the commentary on All’s Well that Ends Well.

Shakespeare creates comic characters more in and for themselves. Beaumont creates a caricature out of individual foolishnesses, but Jonson often puts down individuals of his time with comic forcefulness (individuals who admittedly for just this reason, that they are too much individuals, are often inartistic). From him one gets to know better customs and abuses which other poets have not shown; thus one sees especially from his Every Man out of his Humour that a kind of affectation was beginning to be almost universal, everyone piqued themselves that they spoke the language of the Court, then very stiff and affected. Everyone, who had the least opportunity, rushed to Court and boasted of the style of acquaintance that he had there. In the play in question there is even a character who has himself taught to smoke tobacco according to courtly customs and in gallant style. This scene is among the most humorous of the play. Naturally, individual expressions and styles of speaking were the particular favourites of a certain period, and belonged particularly to a refined way of life: among these is answering a great many questions with ‘O God’ in different nuances of tone. In this play of Jonson’s this obsession is also made comic; for it really is a discovery that seems to be made for fools, for they do indeed pay attention to everything. —Clove and Orange, two foolish fellows, find themselves in the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral, then used for walks; it occurs to them, to play scholars for the benefit of the rest of those present. [Quotes EMO, 3.4.6–31.] (211–12) (d) From the commentary on Twelfth Night. …in many very good plays the action is quite subsidiary and, as it were, only gives the characters opportunity to express themselves— or the action is the main thing, indeed is quite completely so and the characters disappear altogether: one can distinguish between character-comedy and intrigue-comedy. In the latter it is a question merely of extraordinary and lively combinations of circumstances, an intrigue that is unravelled in just as comic a fashion as it was created. The older English theatre had hardly any idea of the comic or of this kind of comedy; two plays excepted, which to me seem by virtue of their true comic direction to stand above all more recent products in which the poet is quite in the native tradition: they are, Shakespeare’s Merry Wives and Jonson’s The Fox. — Here the poets have chosen a comic action, and carried it through with comic characters, have done both of what in more recent comedies is only done singly. Jonson’s other comedies are indeed also pure comedies, but they do not have the great merit of plot, still less its outstanding character drawing, for in this comedy he departs from his habit of presenting individual whole Humours, whole genera of characters, and individualising them too little. (324–5) (e) From the commentary on As You Like It, Act IV, Scene i.

Jaques: Shakespeare certainly intended to make this character a comic one, but comic he is not; in Ben Jonson similar people often appear, but the latter poet makes them laughable in the highest degree through exaggeration. The rage for travel, and the passion for marking oneself out through a mood, especially that of melancholy, seem to have been fairly general at that time. Jaques is probably intended to be a comic version of what Hamlet is in tragedy; the character is finely drawn, only the poet has quite missed the comic, if that was his intention; but in the same way Othello is a very tragic character, but Ford,

BEN JONSON 581

his opposite, is, in spite of some fine depiction, not comic; on the other hand Downright in Ben Jonson’s ‘Every Man [in his Humour]’ is a genuinely comic character, while with Jonson an Othello would probably not have succeeded. In this way each poet has a side where he is strong, and one where he is weaker. Even in Shakespeare not every aspect is combined. (338–9)

582

182. Nathan Drake, Jonson’s inferior genius 1798

From ‘On the Poetry of the Ages of Elizabeth and the Charleses, and of the present reign’, no. 26 of Drake’s Literary Hours Or Sketches Critical and Narrative (Sudbury 1798). The essay argues that the poetry of the last half-century is superior to ‘the entire previous body of our poetry’, Shakespeare excepted (p. 445). Drake (1766–1836) practised medicine in Suffolk and published numerous volumes of essays and two collections of Shakespeare materials, Shakespeare and his Times (1817) and Memorials of Shakespeare (1828). There was a period when the productions of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher were preferred to those of Shakespeare. We are now astonished at the miserable taste of our ancestors, for of Jonson, the celebrated but pedantic Jonson, if we except two or three of his comedies, there is little commendatory to be said. His tragedies are tame and servile copies from the ancients, and though in his comedies of the Fox, the Silent Woman and the Alchemist the characters are strongly cast, and have both wit and humour, they are of a kind by no means generally relished or understood, nor would they now, nor probably will they hereafter, have any popularity on the stage. Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher have certainly many beauties, but I question whether they possess a single piece which a correct taste could endure without very great alteration, and they are loaded with such a mass of obscenity and vulgar buffoonery, that compared with them Shakespeare is chaste and decorous in the extreme. It may justly be said, I think, that their tragedies fall far, very far short indeed, of the energy and allcommanding interest of Shakespeare’s, and their comedies, I suspect, are even greatly inferior to Jonson’s both in plot and humour. They are certainly however superior in genius to Jonson1: they have more simplicity and pathos, and their blank verse has very frequently a peculiar felicity of construction. (449–50) NOTE 1 There is a similar comment on p. 463: ‘the plays of Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher abound with the wildest incongruities both in matter and form, and though Jonson was infinitely more regular yet he wanted the essential of genius’.

584

Bibliography A select list of the most useful books, articles, and theses on Jonson criticism up to 1800

586

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JUDKINS, D.C., The Non-Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson: A Reference Guide (Boston, Mass. 1982).

588

COLLECTIONS OF CRITICISM AND ALLUSIONS BARISH, J.A. (ed.), Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1963). BARISH, J.A. (ed.), Jonson: ‘Volpone’: A Casebook (1972). BENTLEY, G.E., Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (Chicago 1945), 2 vols. Bentley’s conclusions are challenged in FROST, D.L., ‘Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century’, Shakespeare Quarterly (1965), xvi, 81–9, and there are comments and added allusions in reviews of Bentley’s work by BALDWIN, T.W., Journal of English and German Philology (1946), xlv, 232–4; HARBAGE, A., Modern Language Notes (1945), lx, 414–17; MAXWELL, B., Philological Quarterly (1945), xxiv, 91–3; SISSON, C.J. Modern Language Review (1946), xli, 73–4; and WILSON, F.P., Library (1945), xxvi, 199–202. BRADLEY, J.F. and ADAMS, J.Q., The Jonson Allusion-Book (New Haven, Conn. 1922). HERFORD, C.H., SIMPSON, P., and SIMPSON, E. (eds), Ben Jonson, ix (Oxford 1950), 163–258, ‘The Stage History of the Plays’, and xi (Oxford 1952), 305–569‘Jonson’s Literary Record’. HOLDSWORTH, R.V. (ed.), Jonson: ‘Every Man in his Humour’ and ‘The Alchemist’: A Casebook (1978).

590

THE RESPONSE TO JONSON BY INDIVIDUAL CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS BLANSHARD, R.A., ‘Carew and Jonson’, Studies in Philology (1955), lii, 195–211. DONALDSON, I., ‘Fathers and Sons: Jonson, Dryden, and Mac Flecknoe’, Southern Review (1985), xviii, 314–27. FREEHAFER, J., ‘Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry’, Shakespeare Quarterly (1970), xxi, 63–75. GRAHAM, C.B., ‘The Jonsonian Tradition in the Comedies of John Dennis’, Modern Language Notes (1941), lvi, 370–2. GRAHAM, C.B., ‘The Jonsonian Tradition in the Comedies of Thomas D’Urfey’, Modern Language Quarterly (1947), viii, 47–52. HONIGMANN, E.A.J., John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Together with a Photographic Facsimile of Weever’s ‘Epigrammes’ (1599) (Manchester 1987), chs 3– 5. SHARPE, R.B., ‘Jonson’s “Execration” and Chapman’s “Invective”: Their Place in Their Authors’ Rivalry’, Studies in Philology (1945), xlii, 555–63. WARREN, A., ‘Pope and Ben Jonson’, Modern Language Notes (1930), xlv, 86–8.

592

GENERAL STUDIES OF JONSON’S RECEPTION IN HIS OWN TIME HELGERSON, R., Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, Calif. 1983), ch. 3. KAY, W.D., ‘The Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Career: A Reexamination of Facts and Problems’, Modern Philology (1970), lxvii, 224–37. OMANS, S., ‘The War of the Theaters: An Approach to its Origins, Development and Meaning’, Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1969. PATTERSON, A., Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, Wisc. 1984), 49–58. SHARPE, R.B., The Real War of the Theatres: Shakespeare’s Fellows in Rivalry with the Admiral’s Men, 1594– 1603 (Boston, Mass. 1935). SMALL, R.A., The Stage-Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and the So-called Poetasters (Breslau 1899).

594

GENERAL STUDIES OF JONSON’S LATER REPUTATION BONVALET-MALLET, N., ‘Ben Johnson devant la critique française éclairée’, Les Lettres Romanes (1978). xxxii, 197–214. BONVALET-MALLET, N., ‘Adaptations et traductions de Ben Jonson au xviiie siècle’, Les Lettres Romanes (1981), xxxv, 199–234. DONALDSON, I., ‘Damned by Analogies: OR, How to Get Rid of Ben Jonson’, Gambit (1973), vi, 38–46. DONALDSON, I., ‘Jonson and the Moralists’, in KERNAN, A. (ed.), Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson (Baltimore, Md. 1977), 146–64. GRAVES, T.S., ‘Jonson in the Jest Books’, in The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature (Chicago 1923), 127–39. GRAY, C.H., Theatrical Criticism in London to 1795 (New York 1931). LAREGINA, G., ‘Ben Jonson e la sua fortuna nel Seicento’, English Miscellany (1965), xvi, 37–86. NOYES, R.G., ‘Volpone; Or, the Fox—the Evolution of a Nickname’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature (1934), xiv, 161–75. RIDDELL, J.A., ‘Seventeenth-Century Identifications of Jonson’s Sources in the Classics’, Renaissance Quarterly (1975), xxviii, 204–18. SCHOENBAUM, S., ‘Shakespeare and Jonson: Fact and Myth’, in David Galloway (ed.), The Elizabethan Theatre II (1970), 1–19. SHARPE, R.B., ‘Title-Page Mottoes in the Poetomachia’, Studies in Philology (1935), xxxii, 210–20. SIRLUCK, E., ‘Shakespeare and Jonson among the Pamphleteers of the First Civil War’, Modern Philology (1955–6), liii, 88–99. SWEENEY, J.G., III, Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater (Princeton, NJ 1985). TEAGUE, F., The Curious History of ‘Bartholomew Fair’ (1985). TEN HOOR, G.J., ‘Ben Jonson’s Reception in Germany’, Philological Quarterly (1935). xiv, 327–43. WASSERMAN, E.R., Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Urbana, Ill. 1947).

596

STUDIES OF JONSON ON STAGE DIRCKS, R.J., ‘Garrick and Gentleman: Two Interpretations of Abel Drugger’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research (1968), vii, 48–55. NICHOLLS, G.W., ‘Aspects of Stage Productions of Ben Jonson 1660–1776’, Ph.D. thesis, St David’s College, Lampeter, 1972. NICHOLLS, G.W., ‘Jeremy Collier and the Jonson Revivals of 1700’, Trivium (1975), x, 51–61. NOYES, R.G., Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1660–1776 (Cambridge, Mass. 1935). RULFS, D.J., ‘Reception of Elizabethan Playwrights on the London Stage 1776–1833’, Studies in Philology (1949), 54–69. SORELIUS, G., ‘The Giant Race before the Flood’: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration (Uppsala 1966).

598

INDEX

Addison, Joseph 15 411 Adolphus, John 555 Aesop 285 Akenside, Mark 451 Alchemist, The 10 143 167 229 325 370 490 adaptations 511 515 allusions in 502 audience reactions to 297 511 7 conclusion 275 343 406 469 514 564 577 with Epicoene and Volpone as Jonson’s best 173 229 301 349 373 494 511 541 farce in 13 329 449 Garrick’s revival of 12 16 16 opening scene 376 428 too particular and thus obsolete 448 448 490 513 514 541 plot and construction 229 246 338 357 477 prologues to 101 9 174 222 satire in 405 514 517 577 success on stage 156 190 192 219 445 and Tomkis’s Albumazar 255 577 tricks and illusion in 237 283 371 536 see also under individual characters Anacreon 140 Ananias (in The Alchemist) 428 514 Anton, Robert 115 Ariosto, Ludovico 473 Aristophanes 48 212 250 325 402 Aristotle 325 Aubigny, Lord see Stuart, Esmé, Seigneur d’ Aubigny

Bannister, John see under Voltore Bartholomew Fair 301 Brown’s revision of 16 499 characters 251 279 340 493 prefatory matter 109 profanity in 344 puppets in 11 225 puritans in 11 204 225 263 514 reactions to performances of 11 234 reality transformed in 261 variety and unity of 238 246 499 Basse, William 5 Bate, Henry 542 Baxter, Richard 226 Beattie, James 15 505 Beaumont and Fletcher 233 248 275 375 395 575 583 compared with Jonson 7 432 5 459 490 559 folio 194 215 grouped with Jonson 222 230 232 The Maid’s Tragedy 246 282 325 495 Rollo 282 325 433 The Scornful Lady 248 259 wit in 281 299 Beaumont, Francis 6 193 198 201 579 579 Knight of the Burning Pestle 322 as writer of documents 4 95 105 120 5 322 529 Beaumont, Sir John 184 Behn, Aphra 6 8 10 285 297 Bensley, Robert see under Mosca Benson, John 208 Berney, Thomas 10 Betterton, Thomas 17 351 381 Bew, William 204

Baker, David Erskine 14 491 Baker, Henry 385 Baker, Thomas 353

599

600

Boaden, James 522 Bobadil (in Every Man in his Humour, 1616 version) 455 478 479 481 542 553 559 compared to Congreve’s Noll Bluff 559 570 compared to Falstaff 15 529 551 compared to Pistol 13 570 Woodward as 16 438 480 485 493 Boccaccio, Giovanni 322 Bodenham, John 69 Boileau, Nicholas, L’Art Poétique 313 338 Bolton, Edmund, 4 6 95 127 Bonario (in Volpone) 14 337 390 Brainworm (in Every Man in his Humour, 1616 version) 478 479 540 Breton, Nicholas 2 41 Brome, Richard 140 148 Brown, John see under Bartholomew Fair Brown, Tom 11 Buckingham, Duke of see Sheffield, John, Duke of Buckingham Buffone, Carlo (in Every Man out of his Humour) 6 190 193 560 Burke, Edmund 423 Burnaby, William 348 Burton, Robert 4 217 Butler, Samuel 8 241 Calamy, Edmund 226 Caliban (in The Tempest) 393 470 Camden, Lord see Pratt, Charles, Baron (later Earl) Camden Camden, William 437 561 Capell, Edward 15 500 Carew, Thomas 143 Cartwright, William 193 215 320 322 464 Cary, Lucius, Second Viscount Falkland 143 149 173 180 189 190 464 Case is Altered, The 2 67 322 460 471 Catiline 103 182 191 219 3 325 396 413 509 individual scenes 245 327 364 416 557 562 popular on stage 322 solecisms in 9 9 292 use of sources 322 327 411 431 441 469 483 497 509 speeches in 431 455 463 stagecraft in 8 246 261 291

whether true tragedy 282 301 427 445 467 507 509 unpopular on stage 4 11 156 263 270 297 355 493 verse in 262 282 see also under individual characters Catiline (character) 146 198 203 357 397 415 433 561 Catullus 473 501 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle 229 Cavendish, William, Earl (later Duke) of Newcastle 175 229 273 Celia (in Volpone) 14 390 555 Cethegus (in Catiline) 291 399 415 Chalmers, George 20 Chapman, George 69 83 117 127 Charles I 184 Chaucer, Geoffrey 335 380 577 Chettle, Henry 69 Churchill Charles 483 502 Cibber, Colley 402 495 Cibber, Theophilus 444 481 see also under Drugger, Abel Cicero (author) 33 Cicero (in Catiline) 398 415 416 his orations, defended or commended 105 187 198 203 357 399 his orations, as literal translations 293 325 415 431 561 Clarendon see Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon Clement, Justice (in BartholomewFair) 559 Cleveland, John 466 Clun, Walter see under Subtle Cob (in Every Man in his Humour) 340 Cobb, Samuel 356 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 21 23 Collier, Jane 18 453 Collier, Jeremy 6 340 Colman, George 16 519 540 564 see also under Epicoene and Volpone Comedy of Errors. The 362 Common, Dol (in The Alchemist) 223 376 Congreve, William 330 363 381 495 525 570 572 as writer of documents 335 344 376 see also under Bobadil

601

Corbaccio (in Volpone) 364 522 acted by Johnson 364 556 acted by Parsons 523 555 ridicule of his deafness misplaced 11 14 337 338 390 448 449 Corneille, Pierre 247 250 251 326 411 Coriolanus 379 Corvino (in Volpone) 390 555 Coventry, Henry 5 Cowley, Abraham 267 395 Cumberland, Richard 13 568 Cutbeard (in Epicoene) 543 Cymbeline 531 Cythia’s Revels 4 21 34 283 285 467 Daniel, George 205 Daniel, Samuel 71 91 117 D’Anvers, Caleb 396 Dauphine (in Epicoene) 275 344 543 544 Davenant, Sir William 169 225 361 381 Davies, Thomas 15 20 547 557 Daw, Sir John (in Epicoene) 279 340 443 543 Dekker, Thomas 2 41 69 74 221 461 Satiromastix 2 3 51 65 69 de Muralt, Béat Louis 11 333 Dennis, John 12 349 365 371 376 letters to Congreve 11 12 335 452 Devil is an Ass, The 225 283 285 322 370 449 Dibdin, Charles 21 Digby, Sir Kenelme 169 Digges, Dudley 96 188 Digges, Leonard 5 155 529 562 Donne, John 4 95 322 474 Downright (in Every Man in his Humour, 1616 version) 551 559 580 Drake, Nathan 17 21 580 Drugger, Abel (in The Alchemist) 405 406 481 502 518 Garrick’s 12 13 16 17 437 477 513 518 Garrick’s changes to 16 564 Garrick’s, compared to Weston’s 537 Garrick’s, compared to Cibber’s 547 564 Garrick’s stage business as 407 481 Dryden, John 9–18 passim, 16 23 285 285 288 435

answers to 6 9 241 270 277 319 19 343 469 documents by 243 259 273 291 296 301 313 330 as playwright 275 291 335 344 355 381 483 quoted 362 381 385 438 445 470 479 542 543 563 his view of Jonson’s ‘Ode’ to Shakespeare 8 360 380 535 Drummond, William see under Jonson, Ben du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur 81 Duppa, Bishop Bryan 180 193 Earles, John 139 Eliot, T.S. 22 Elizabeth I 183 Epicoene 120 259 343 370 381 405 543 adaptations 511 541 Collegiate Ladies in 275 441 542 dialogue 251 564 as model play 8 248 250 544 plot 246 251 338 435 542 revivals, by Colman 16 20 540 26 564 revivals, by Garrick 12 441 563 revivals, by others 11 225 234 241 263 satire and topical allusions in 405 544 564 sources 322 428 490 see also under individual characters and under The Alchemist Etherege, Sir George 303 376 Euripides 107 571 Every Man in his Humour 248 269 459 465 477 511 519 characters 551 559 as humours play 2 59 159 437 478 Jonson’s revision of 461 478 497 language of 241 294 559 plot 438 478 481 revivals, by Garrick 12 16 16 437 443 464 476 493 525 549 revivals, by others 267 2 546 see also under individual characters Every Man out of his Humour 9 29 159 294 322 466 characters 13 447 560 humours in 31 34 452 478 579

602

as satire 2 32 59 see also under Buffone, Carlo Face (in The Alchemist) 223 283 343 377 406 Falkland, see Cary, Lucius, second Viscount Falkland Falstaff 14 274 405 451 490 561 humours in 250 259 450 see also under Bobadil Farquhar, George 14 Felltham, Owen 4 142 198 323 494 Fennor, William 115 Field, Nathaniel 106 Fielding, Henry 15 399 Fielding, Sarah 18 411 453 Fitzgeffrey, Charles 65 322 Flecknoe, Richard 6 7 9 232 270 301 Fletcher, John 7 12 215 252 274 295 466 characters and dialogue 247 274 331 comparedwith Jonson 215 233 274 301 compared with Shakespeare 248 253 324 The Faithful Shepherdess 106 247 253 433 471 564 grouped with Jonson 7 9 271 325 402 incorrect 248 293 321 as writer of document 105 Foote, Samuel 17 549 Ford (in The Merry Wives of Windsor) 580 see also under Kitely Ford, John, The Melancholy Lover 421 Fox, Charles 556 Fuller, Thomas 8 11 230 322 Garrick, David 12 13 15 17 441 464 his Captain Flash 552 The Jubilee Garrick (contd)364 letters to 499 509 533 as writer of documents 16 407 536 see also under The Alchemist; Drugger, Abel; Epicoene; Every Man in his Humour, Kitely Gay, John 15 Gayton, Edmund 219 Gentleman, Francis 16 17 438 509 515 533 Gifford, William 21 Gilchrist, Octavius 21 Gildon, Charles 13 14 169 351 363 373 Gill, Alexander 162 213 321 445

Godolphin, Sidney 190 Godwin, William 21 144 Goodwin, R. 145 Gorboduc, by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville 325 Gower, John 335 Greg, W.W. 22 Greville, Fulke 81 Guilpin, William 37 Guthrie, William 14 16 411 435 Hales, John see under Shakespeare, William Hamlet 371 489 532 580 Harington, Sir John 502 Hawkins, Sir Thomas 186 Hayward, Edward 119 Hazlitt, William 21 Heath, Robert 11 Henry IV, Part 1 297 364 Herbert, Sir Edward (later Lord) 79 143 211 Herford and Simpson (C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson) 22 Herrick, Robert 217 Heywood, Thomas 269 Hippisley, John 435 Hoadley, Benjamin, The Suspicious Husband 16 see also under Kitely Hobbes, Thomas 15 Holiday, Barton 211 Holland, Hugh 127 Homer 87 187 273 327 470 see also under Shakespeare, William Hooke, William 226 Hopkins, William 542 Horace (Jonson as) 3 41 47 51 69 81 461 Horace (poet) 29 140 185 198 305 322 394 his Ars Poetica cited 99 327 329 337 385 507 see also under Hurd, Richard Howard, Edward 6 8 10 23 259 320 documents by 281 297 4 317 Howard, Sir Robert 259 259 Howell, James 16 167 186 Hume, David 452 Hunt, Leigh 22 Hurd, Richard:

603

dissertation on drama 13 18 23 446 462 493 560 letter on imitation 13 472 500 notes to Horace 429 491 497 505 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon 149 264 Ireland, William Henry 20 Isle of Dogs, The, by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe 2 Jaques (in As You Like It) 580 Jenner, Charles 511 Johnson, Benjamin see under Corbaccio Johnson, Samuel 417 Jones, Inigo 222 document by 123 Jonson’s attack on 17 489 167 201 as Jonson’s enemy 4 165 Jonson, Ben: The Art of Poetry (translated from Horace) 79 83 209 327 417 562 Conversations with William Drummond, 2 79 123 170 444 Discoveries, in general 22 340 344 375 497 Discoveries, on Shakespeare 19 20 362 380 381 The English Grammar, 131 335 epigrams, as a group 59 112 121 127 167 epigrams, individual 20 29 79 422 ‘Execration upon Vulcan’ 41 127 471 Leges Conviviales 321 464 lyrics and songs 12 21 168 459 467 474 569 masques and entertainments 22 73 89 97 175 229 541 (see also under Jones, Inigo); masques, and Shakespeare 474 500 569 ‘Ode to Himself’ 4 139 323 422 ‘Ode’ to Shakespeare 8 379 444 529 533 560 (see also under Dryden, John); Workes (1616) 7 113 117 347 see also under individual characters and plays Jonsonus Virbius 5 10 167 180 Julius Caesar 288 362 379 385 Juvenal 48 274 322

Killigrew, Tom 235 King, Henry 186 King John 509 Kitely (in Every Man in his Humour, 1616 version) 455 477 478 478 502 542 compared to Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor 546 551 552 553 559 compared to Othello 479 547 compared to Strickland in The Suspicious Husband 476 480 527 Garrick’s 12 438 444 480 481 493 509 Smith’s 505 547 Knepp, Elizabeth 241 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy: additions to 22 Horace-Jonson an actor in 57 Kynaston, Edward 225 La Foole, Sir Amorous (in Epicoene) 279 443 543 544 Langbaine, Gerald 6 9 317 493 Lee, Nathaniel, Lucius Junius Brutus 371 Lentulus (in Catiline) 415 Levin, William 17 385 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 537 Lucan 198 Lucy, George 4 Macbeth 16 292 364 407 547 Macilente (in Every Man out of His Humour) 3 455 Macklin, Charles 18 20 419 Magnetic Lady, The 11 159 167 213 322 343 569 Jonson’s defence of 321 569 stagecraft in 14 162 246 Malone, Edmund 13 18 passim, 319 Mammon, Sir Epicure (in The Alchemist) 193 406 428 513 536 570 577 see also under Steele, Sir Richard Marmion, Shackerley 199 Marston, John 2 29 37 41 45 passim; documents by 75 87 89 Histriomastix 2 3 202 Martial 501 Massinger, Thomas 559 583 Mayne, Jasper 10 190 466 Meade, Robert 203

604

Medbourne, Matthew 269 Meres, Francis 1 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 13 248 363 363 413 551 579 Milton, John 5 467 474 Mohun, Major Michael 562 Molière 251 349 377 448 compared with Jonson 238 333 433 Montague, Elizabeth 509 Morison, Sir Henry 149 180 Morose (in Epicoene) 377 405 428 455 543 544 563 as farcicalcharacter 11 338 as humours character 14 339 443 451 whether based on a real character or not 10 23 250 285 285 376 381 542 Morris, Corbyn 14 405 Mosca (in Volpone) 23 337 390 494 521 556 572 acted by Bensley 522 523 555 acted by Wilkes 364 Mucedorus 99 Much Ado About Nothing 363 Munday, Anthony 69 Murphy, Arthur 15 16 437 450 476 Nashe, Thomas 2 Neve, Philip 575 Newcastle, Earl of see Cavendish, William, Earl (later Duke) of Newcastle New Inn, The 4 16 138 159 159 493 Numps (in Bartholomew Fair) 283 O’Brien, William 483 Oldham, John 6 10 303 322 Oldisworth, Nicholas 137 Othello 325 385 547 580 Otter, Thomas (in Epicoene) 443 543 Otway, Thomas, Venice Preserved 375 Ovid 47 241 274 322 Metamorphoses 69 285 Palgrave, Francis 21 Palmer, John 544 555 Parnassus plays 69 Parsons, William, see under Corbaccio Pembroke, William, Earl of 103 121 183

Pepys, Samuel 11 223 234 241 259 262 Pericles 4 140 142 Persius 48 Petronius 469 Phillips, Edward 11 299 Philostratus 569 Pindar 140 198 Pistol (Shakespeare character) 406 see also under Bobadil Plautus 34 119 212 275 329 387 Jonson’s debts to 67 241 322 329 340 362 471 as Jonson’s model 320 448 559 Poetaster 3 41 301 322 361 561 Apologetical Dialogue, 2 45 427 561 epilogue, 7 467 as personal satire 321 322 461 466 561 sources 319 322 561 Poetomachia 2 69 Pope, Alexander 381 455 473 475 501 533 documents by 379 394 Porter, Endymion 361 Portland, Richard, Lord Weston, Earl of 183 Poussin, Nicholas 413 Pratt, Charles, Baron (later Earl) Camden 17 533 Purcell, Henry 499 Quintilian 292 Racine, Jean 411 Ramsay, Henry 203 Randolph, Thomas 13 139 159 447 464 Ravenscroff, Edward 285 Reed, Isaac 16 Rich, Christopher 351 Roberts, John 381 Rochester, Lord see Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester Rogers, Samuel 491 Rowe, Nicholas 17 18 169 360 Rubens, Peter Paul 447 Rymer, Thomas 11 325 Sackville, Charles, Lord Dorset 267 The Sad Shepherd 170 343 459 470 474 564 among Jonson’s best 21 22 577

605

Waldron’s continuation of 14 567 Saint-Evremond, Charles de Saint-Denis, Sieur de 8 235 333 Sallust 127 as Jonson’s model for Catiline 415 literal translations in Catiline from 297 445 483 497 507 509 variations in Catiline from 322 433 470 Savile, Sir Henry 561 Schlegel, A.W. 21 Scory, Edmund 97 Sejanus 19 83 167 198 455 561 comic scenes in 245 470 557 Gentleman’s adaptation 16 438 craftsmanship in 246 246 468 reception on stage 4 11 84 87 115 121 156 270 rhymed verse in 247 262 282 as tragedy of state, 182 202 463 translations in 83 84 249 320 411 435 441 463 511 561 sources 319 466 whether true tragedy 83 95 301 427 462 467 509 see also under individual characters Sejanus (character) 151 561 as nickname 14 Selden, John 4 107 117 191 267 464 Sempronia (in Catiline) 416 470 Seneca 198 212 322 470 Settle, Elkanah 9 Seward, Thomas 432 Shadwell, Thomas 9 263 273 301 395 as writer of documents 6 9 257 277 Shakespeare 69 291 351 395 405 417 427 460 characters 447 529 579 579 compared to Beaumont and Fletcher and Jonson, 432 459 compared to Jonson 1 5 passim, 193 232 247 289 385 411 432 489 509 531 573 defended by Hales 169 248 361 as entertainment 201 215 Homer to Jonson’s Virgil 249 411 435 incorrect 293 295 321 his learning 59 453 483 505 544 Jonson preferred to 6 8 241 Jonson’s criticisms of 1 8 393 425 470 531

533 Jonson’s malevolence towards 360 393 421 455 as natural 7 233 545 as pioneer 232 317 popularity of plays 155 297 529 preferred to Jonson, 1 8 253 324 450 522 559 561 568 583 relations with Jonson 69 367 379 381 494 561 574 sources of his plays 275 319 428 sublime 573 see also under individual characters and plays, and under Jonson, Ben Sharpe, Lewis, The Noble Stranger 7 Sheffield, John, Duke of Buckingham 237 373 387 The Rehearsal 326 563 Shiells, Robert 444 Shift (in Every Man out of His Humour) 193 Shirley, James 4 174 215 The Cardinal, The Traitor 282 Shuter, Edward 481 493 522 526 Sidney, Algernon 396 Sidney, Sir Philip 81 205 295 320 375 Smith, G.Gregory 22 Smith, Sir Thomas 81 Smith, William see under Kitely Soame, Sir William 313 Sorbière, Samuel 243 Spence, Joseph 381 Spenser, Edmund 205 380 494 501 Sprat, Thomas 243 Stanhope, Charles, second Lord 125 Stanton, William 194 Staple of News, The 133 322 Steele, Sir Richard 14 15 357 364 373 376 as Sir Epicure Mammon 14 373 Steevens, George 18 529 Stephen, Master (in Every Man in his Humour, 1616 version) 455 478 479 481 483 493 543 compared to Slender 551 553 559 Strode, William 139 Stuart, Esmé, Seigneur d’Aubigny 121 183 Stutvile, George 177 Subtle (in The Alchemist) 223 377 405 406 428 514 515

606

acted by Clun 264 264 Suckling, Sir John 5 168 233 248 321 ‘A Session of the Poets’ 7 172 323 Sutton, Sir Thomas 387 Swinburne, Algernon 22 Sylla’s Ghost (in Catiline) 6 203 305 317 322 326 370 Sympson, J. (editor) 470 Tale of a Tub, The 125 343 370 Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme Liberata 317 Tate, Nahum 11 327 Tempest, The 111 375 393 470 474 531 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 21 Terence 212 275 313 340 433 448 Jonson’s debts to 329 357 559 Theobald, Lewis 14 367 381 390 455 Thornton, Bonnell 441 Theophrastus 447 Tiberius (in Sejanus) 561 Tieck, Ludwig 21 577 Timon of Athens 525 Tomkis, Thomas, Albumazar see under The Alchemist Townley, Zouch 213 Truewit (in Epicoene) 274 275 295 335 363 542 544 Tucca (in Poetaster and Satiromastix) 41 51 56 561 Twelfth Night 33 531 Upton, John 16 425 469 Vanbrugh, Sir John 363 495 The Provok’d Husband 402 546 Virgil (in Poetaster) 43 461 Virgil (poet) 47 190 241 273 274 322 475 see also under Shakespeare, William Volpone 4 13 93 229 370 448 570 Act V and ending 14 16 95 246 337 344 390 468 563 572 characters 359 522 Colman’s revival 519 553 imperfections 21 494 521 learned 159

mountebank scene 330 390 448 449 468 563 plot and construction 8 96 335 338 525 563 prologue 373 570 reactions to revivals 14 17 235 359 364 387 525 Saint-Evremond’s adaptation 237 satire in 93 387 405 scene of Volpone and Celia 13 353 sources 322 571 setting 461 success on stage 16 156 190 192 445 tortoiseshell episode 10 11 313 330 448 449 verse in 261 see also individual characters and under The Alchemist Volpone (character) 23 337 377 387 390 405 555 572 as nickname 14 Voltore (in Volpone): Bannister as 555 Von Gerstenberg, H.W. 495 Waldron, Francis see under The Sad Shepherd Waller, Edmund 6 189 435 Walpole, Horace 17 487 Walpole, Sir Robert 14 Walwyn, B. 551 War of the Theatres see Poetomachia Warburton, William 16 390 Webster, John 4 Weever, John 29 37 51 West, Richard 6 201 Weston, Thomas see under Drugger, Abel Whalley, Peter 12 16 17 23 459 quoted by later writers 476 478 480 493 497 Wilkes, Robert see under Mosca Wilkes, Thomas 481 Whitehead, William 437 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester 8 9 562 Winter’s Tale, The 470 Wood, Anthony à, 322 Woodfall, Henry Sampson, Jr. 574 Woodward, Henry see under Bobadil

607

Wotton, William 335 Would-Be, Lady (in Volpone) 468 555 Would-be, Sir Politick (in Volpone) 428 461 555 572 Wycherly, William 338 395 Young, Edward 15 483 563