Search Results

This lecture discusses William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who were the two supreme writers of early modern England. It reveals that these two writers were intricately and curiously interwoven. The lecture describes their styles of writerly self-presentation and their professional pathways. Shakespeare and Jonson also served as each others' creative stimulant, example, and irritant.

Ben Jonson had become established as the leading court poet within a few years of James VI and I's accession to the throne. Though he was never officially created laureate, he was on close personal terms with the king and was the regular author of court masques from 1605 to the end of the reign. His political stance marked a significant break with the major Tudor traditions of public poetry. Edmund Spenser had inherited from mid-century gospellers the idea of the poet as a prophet, celebrating the achievements of the Reformation and satirizing ecclesiastical abuses. Jonson reacted against this Protestant prophetic tradition in the most emphatic possible way: in the 1590s he became converted to Catholicism. Jonson never attempted to present himself as a prophetic poet; his stance was that of a detached and ironic observer of human affairs rather than a visionary who laid claim to special prophetic insights.

The surviving works from Ben Jonson's library offer evidence of sides to his character which are not immediately apparent in his works, for the simple reason that they involve numbers rather than words. Over six per cent of Jonson's books, many of them annotated, are concerned with mathematics, technology, strategy, and architecture. They allow us to glimpse roles that augment, and to some extent redefine, the classical Jonson of tradition. And they enable us to see more clearly the imaginative breadth that he was able to bring to bear in the creation of his poems and masques. This chapter lays the groundwork for a more precise evaluation of the importance of this reading in his theory and practice.

This chapter suggests that the early collaborative masques and entertainments open an exciting possibility – Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones appear to have used the Hypnerotomachia as an imaginative meeting-place, drawing on its narrative in order to pull a multiplicity of detail culled from handbooks, pattern books, and visual memory into a coherent form. The dream-like quality of Colonna's work – with its contrasts, transformations, instability between the real and the symbolic, and curiously undramatic action – made it an attractive model for the collaborators, as it seemed to answer formal problems peculiar to the masque. Accordingly they adapted it to their own requirements, condensing, displacing, and dramatizing the source material in a creative process that resembles the mechanisms which Freud – who remains one of the most acute observers of the workings of the imagination – has seen at work in the act of dreaming itself.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The foregoing chapters have revealed close links between Jonson and the Vitruvian aesthetic. The historical evidence has shown that Jonson's attack on Jones was launched from the inside of the Vitruvian tradition. The case of Colonna has suggested that behind Jonson's early ‘fables’ and Jones's early scenery lay the common imaginative ground of Vitruvian romance. This enquiry into Jonson's Vitruvianism does not attempt to displace the view that Jonson's main appeal lies in the dynamism of his satiric drama, the asymmetry of his comic writing, the oddity of his images and imagination, or the vitality of that less formal voice which is capable of mocking its owner's ‘rockie face’ and ‘mountaine belly’. Yet it does seek to recognize the presence, behind the numbers and patterns that constitute the Jonsonian ‘solidity’, of real aesthetic forces which may be opened up by an understanding of their form and historical context. The historical significance of the Vitruvian aesthetic is discussed.

Ackerman's analysis of the characteristic features of Palladio's style offers us, in passing, a succinct summation of the structural principles identified in Jonson's critical theory. This chapter tests these theoretical precepts against Jonson's poetic practice. It examines central lines in particular groups of poems to see if they really act as focal points in terms of ‘invention’ and ‘disposition’. The chapter does not imply that the Vitruvian aesthetic is applicable to the whole of Jonson's work. For the strategies employed by both poet and architect are determined as much by occasion, function, and audience as they are by prescriptive rules. Rather, the chapter focuses on the three closely related poetic groups in which the import of the aesthetic can most forcibly be felt – the dedications to works by Catholic authors, the ‘pillar’ poems or ‘moral squares’, and the epitaphs – attempting in each case to correlate poetic organization, theory, and occasional context.

Vitruvianism offered Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones more than a set of rules. Even a cursory consideration of the early collaborative masques and entertainments – in which formal Vitruvian elements are mixed with ruins and pyramids in an overall mood which seems to take its cue from romance rather than the architectural treatises – reveal that they took at least some part of their inspiration from the less-formal tradition of Vitruvian thinking. This chapter examines the influence of one work – Francesco Colonna's romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – which Jonson and Jones used as a common imaginative resource in the shaping of their early masques and entertainments. They used it because it offered them a narrative (from which Jonson could draw segments and adapt them to his own purposes), as well as ceremonies, hieroglyphs, striking visual images, and a statement of Vitruvian theory couched in literary terms that both poet and architect would have found congenial.

In seventeenth‐century England, masques inhabited two media, their dramatic occasions consistently delivered into a public culture of reading. This chapter details masques' material circulation in print culture: print and scribal reproduction, provenance, annotations, rights and reprints, marketing as sheet music. While bibliographic attention is crucial, it offers a starting point rather than a terminus for exploring masques' (or any texts') position in their culture. The chapter explores ways that scriptors address readers in the prefaces and margins, drawing examples from masques of Jonson, Campion, Daniel, Chapman, Shirley, William Browne, Thomas Jordan, Middleton/Rowley, and Heywood. It analyzes the hermeneutics of reading in two seventeenth‐century accounts: legal documents surrounding the prosecution of William Prynne, and an essay on the book trade by Newcastle bookseller William London, testing Habermas's theories of the public sphere against these early modern accounts.

This chapter examines the structural patterns in Jonson's early masques and the way in which scenography, music, and even choreography are related to his ‘Fables’ through a common symbolism of number. From the outset it is clear that the verbal surfaces of the masques are packed with numerical and geometrical allusions, and that the fascination with the metalanguage of mathematics and the science of harmonics observed in Jonson's early encomiastic poetry extends into the realm of his Court productions.

D. J. Gordon claims that the central conceit of the masque is to build a complex emblem of Union which binds the theme of love as a harmonizing power within the body to a local event (marriage), a national event (the unification of Scotland and England under James and Anne – who were both present at the masque), and to the larger Neoplatonic theme of love as a force holding the macrocosm together. Orrell is able to take the idea further by suggesting that Jonson's proportioning of line numbers enacts a ‘principle of consonance’ underlying the whole work. He does not, however, explore the aesthetic consequences of this newly found structural integrity or investigate the dynamic interplay of different number levels that may be discovered in the masque. This chapter first considers these matters in more detail and then examines the structural kinship that binds Hymenaei to The Haddington Masque, The Masque of Beauty, and The Masque of Blackness.

This chapter focuses on the structural differences in Jonson's later masques – namely Oberon, Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, Love Restored, and The Irish Masque – compared with those that came before. The decrease in Jonson's use of harmony as a means of structuring the overall form of the masques does not mean that he neglects numbers altogether. A glance at the more complex (and less ‘musical’) proportions in the masques of the 1616 Folio implies that these became, if anything, more functionally relevant after 1609 than they had been in the earlier period; and help us to view the continuity of Jonson's thought with greater clarity.

This chapter focuses on The Masque of Queens, which formally introduces the theory of antimasque to the English audience. The masque can be seen as a pivotal work in Jonson's career: crowning the experimentalism of the earlier masques with a new firmness of technique and execution at the same time as it paved the way for the new, more ‘dramatic’, concept of masque that formed the focus of his experimentation before the publication of the 1616 Folio. Its ‘fable’ and overall shape are comparatively simple. The whole clearly breaks into two main sections: the antimasque (which extends to 1. 254; MQ,1. 343), and the masque itself (11.255– 372; MQ, 11.367–773). The fact that the antimasque is concerned with the machinations of twelve witches who plan to bring chaos into a world bereft of virtue, while the masque proper frightens the witches away by the appearance of twelve famous and virtuous Queens, may perhaps alert us – even at this stage – to the possible symbolic correspondence of line number and character number, since the line total for the whole masque (372 lines of spoken and sung text) submits to simple division by twelve (12 × 31).

This chapter discusses Ben Jonson's play The Fountaine of Selfe-Love, which concerns the craze among a group of decadent courtiers for the waters of a magic fountain: they are members of ‘Cynthia's’ court, a thinly disguised version of Elizabeth's court. Ben Jonson specifically drew the image of the court as a corrupting fountain from the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, a 12th-century political treatise. The image of the court as an enervating fountain is here a central and potent one, and attention is drawn to it in the 1513 editions by the marginal note, the court compared to the fountain of Salmacis. The fountain of Salmacis and the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are not directly invoked by Jonson in The Fountaine of Selfe-Love. Jonson's fountain is both visual and material, at the same time as it is textual and metaphorical.

This introductory chapter begins by setting out the unifying theme of the studies in this book, namely a concern for Jonson's sense of pattern, in so far as it manifests itself in the structure and organization of his encomiastic work. It then reviews Jonson's works. Frequently in his critical writings, masques, and encomiastic poetry, Jonson employs the metalanguages of architecture and mathematics. He advocates that poems should be constructed like buildings, according to proportional principles which resemble those in Vitruvian architecture; praises friends in poetic pillars; and strews the texts of the early masques with the flowers of an assimilated number theory that hints at underlying structural patterns. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Given the inescapably stark realities of life and death in Jonson's London, it might seem surprising that the plague and its contemporary accounts have not figured more importantly in readings of Jonson's nondramatic poetry. One exception is the work of Patrick Phillips, who shows that the shadow of the plague haunts Jonson's writing career, from the epigrams to his epitaphs for John Roe, through The Alchemist to the Cary-Morison ode—all documents in the history of the poet's bereavement. Such an overview goes far toward probing the sources of Jonson's deep-seated melancholy, his continuing traumatic need to rewrite the death of his “best piece of poetrie,” his returning to the scene of a young man dead of infectious disease and mourned by the older poet, and the motivation behind his paternal sponsorship of a younger generation of the “Sons of Ben.”

This chapter argues for an inclusive study of masque events, masque receivers, and reception theory. It examines not only audiences present at court performances, but also the commercial print accounts of private masques and intertextual glimpses of one subgenre of entertainment within another that create a complex nexus of elite and quasi‐public culture. Drawing examples from Jonson's Golden Age Restored, Davenant's Britannia Triumphans, the court pastoral Florimène (designed by Jones), and Shakespeare's Tempest, this chapter develops an understanding of “publicity” as fluidly constituted in dialectical relationship to different articulations of exclusion, interest, and edict. Whereas contemporary masque criticism usually takes producers' intentions as its purview, this chapter argues for also addressing gaps between intention and effect by examining various ways in which court audiences responded to masques outside any purposefully scripted set of meanings, and for extending investigation beyond the social, geographic, hermeneutic, and temporal boundaries of court audiences.

This chapter shows that Ben Jonson’s practice in imitating classical poetry was far more deeply indebted to the kinds of ‘formal’ imitation described in Chapter 6 than Jonson himself would have wished to admit. The epigrams of Martial in particular were not in a simple sense ‘sources’ of material for Jonson’s poetry: rather he sought to imitate the rhetorical figurations and manner of Martial and other authors. The chapter argues Jonson’s own (highly derivative) remarks on imitation in the Discoveries should not be simply taken as guides to his practice. It argues for strong affinities between Jonson’s work as a translator and his practice as an imitator. As both an imitator and as a translator Jonson responded not just to the vocabulary and sense of his originals but also to what Cicero in De Optimo Genere Oratorum had termed their ‘figura’, or rhetorical shape. The chapter concludes by showing how Jonson’s mode of ‘formal’ imitation enabled him to create a style which subsequent imitators—both of his works and of classical poetry—could imitate, and how Thomas Randolph, Robert Herrick, and others imitated Jonson’s style and practice.

This chapter develops a hermeneutics of the masque adequate both to the distinctiveness of occasional drama and to the qualities it shares with other kinds of literature and theater. This chapter analyzes two Jacobean court masques less to explore the assertion or fracturing of power than to unpack how multiple modes of authority performatively negotiate the conditions of their own practices. Case studies include Jonson's Irish Masque at Court and For the Honour of Wales. In both masques, efforts to use drama to stabilize authority are deconstructed by the rich ambiguity inherent to both language and performance, highlighted by occasional circumstances of King James's Scots‐English dialect and Prince Charles's status as inheritor of the title from his dead brother.