Emile Legouis and Ben Jonson

Emile Legouis and Ben Jonson

Jonson as the centre for a study of Renaissance English drama.

Jonson belongs to the generation, born some ten years after Shakespeare, which was the most prolific of variously talented writers. He was the contemporary of Dekker, Marston, Middleton, Fletcher, Tourneur, Webster, and Thomas Heywood, with every one of whom he was connected: he was the friend of some, and he quarrelled with several others. There are several reasons why Jonson, rather than Shakespeare, be regarded as the rightful centre for a study of Renaissance drama. Jonson's career as a dramatist was fairly long: 1597- 1633. We have a relatively large amount of information regarding his life and character. He was a man of an aggressive nature which brought him into con- flict with several of his fellow dramatists. His plays contain numerous con- temporary allusions and satirical portraits of actual persons of his day and he gives us many expositions of dramatic history.

His opposition to the prevailing taste.

 In one sense, he was more original than Shakespeare. Shakespeare accepts the conditions of the stage of his time; he is aware of its shortcomings, but he reconciles, himself to them with a smile. His relations with his public remain sympathetic. Jonson however, is in angry and arrogant opposition to the Elizabethan stage, and sets up his own tastes, ideas, and theories, all derived from the ancients, against the popular taste. He also makes sarcastic references to his public. Thus, while Shakespeare passively follows the course of the stream, Jonson throws his huge bulk against it

A man of learning.

Jonson was truly learned. Throughout his life he copied into a note-book passages which struck him during his reading of the ancients, and he repeatedly consulted these passages when he was writing his plays, adapting them, if necessary, to the circumstances of his own time. He was acquainted not only with the great writers of antiquity but also with for- gotten, mediocre authors and with the commentators and critics. He was as well-read in the historians as in the poets. When he brings antiquity back to life in his plays, his work is amply documented and he reveals an accurate conception of manners and customs. When he paints the society of his own day, he has made an equally careful preliminary study and has, like a modern impressionist, brought together numerous details from life, picturesque touches, strange things he has seen and speeches-especially foolish speeches--which he has heard.

A satirist and realist.

Ben Jonson was temperamentally a satirist, and his education made him a realist, Every Man in His Humour, his first celebrated work, revealed his true tendencies. Its scene was first laid in Italy, but he soon changed it to London, thus showing that the characters he had sketched were English, and based on direct personal observation. This play introduces us to a group of eccentrics. Each of the characters has his particular "humour", his prevailing mood or rather his oddity, mental habit or fad. Jonson's method may be compared to that of Dickens, whose cheerfulness he however lacks, because he is a satirist rather than an amusing writer, and painstaking rather than spontaneous. In this play there is an old gentleman who is excessively worried because his son, a young poet, is indulging in amorous adventures: it is the father's "humour" thus to make himself miserable. There is a merchant whose "humour" it is to be a jealous husband. Two young self-confident and foolish men of fashion exist only to be duped. An honest optimistic magis- trate has unshakable faith in the virtues of a cup of wine. Bobadill, a braggart of a new kind, deceives everyone by his good manners, his reticence like that of a man sure of himself, and the calm voice in which he uiters his improbable boasts. Bobadill is the equal of Falstaff in telling ready lies, but he remains a quite distinct and original type.

The place of humours.

The fixed, narrow limits of Jonson's characterization, as indicated above, were opposed to the practice of contemporary dramatists who gave their characters full play, developing them spaciously and endowing them with complexity and the faculty of growth so that they sometimes became incoherent. These other dramatists made oddity the characteristic only of their secondary characters. It was only to characters like Pistol and Nym that Shakespeare gave "humours". Jonson bestows humours on all his characters, and especially the principal characters.

Exclusion of romantic elements.

Jonson excludes romanticism from this play, and is careful to sustain its comic tone. In this he shows himself the disciple of the ancient comic playwrights. There is no mingling here of more sensational elements. He hows a high sense of what is appropriate. (In the second edition of this play Jonson deleted an eloquent apology for poetry which occurred in the first edition. He thought this apology to be too warm in tone and pitched in too lofty a key).

Lack of true unity in this play.

The structure of this play is, however, not very close, and no progress towards true unity is seen. This initial work and the plays which followed it immediately are rather reviews of grotesque types than strongly built comedies. Jonson assimilated classical qualities only gradually, one by one, we might say, and he never displayed them all in the same play. At this ume of his career he could not yet claim, as he does in the Prologue printed in 1616, to have got rid of anything more than the gross licence and puerilities of staging which Sidney had exposed.

The defect in character-portrayal.

He was, moreover, deceiving him- self when he thought that he had depicted real men in his plays. He noticed only obvious individual peculiarities or the violent actions of exceptional per- sons. He showed also almost total disregard of fundamental feelings common to making, and his ignorance of love. He thus never got near to nature in the classical meaning of the word. To find in his plays a character who is merely a man or a woman is almost impossible. In this, the essential respect, Jonson is far less classical than Shakespeare.

Caricatures of actual persons.

In his later comedies, Jonson's satirical attitude becomes stronger. In Every Man Out of His Humour, Jonson himself is Asper, the harsh and pitiless Judge of whatever is ridiculous or vicious, a cynic who could be compared to Diogenes. Like Persius or Juvenal, he says:

I'll stripe the ragged follies of the time,

Naked, as at their birth,

and

with a whip of steel

Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs.

Several grotesque characters in the play are probably caricatures of actual persons who must have been recognised by a section of the public. But the portraits undoubtedly exaggerate the eccentricity and extravagance of their subjects. Deliro is the worshipful husband consistently snubbed by his wife. Puntarvolo, the mad, fanciful gentleman who lives a chivalrous romance, enters his house, as though it were a strong castle, winding the horn that his door may be opened to him, making his own wife come to the threshold in response to his knight-errant's challenge. Fastidious Brisk is the silly courtier absorbed by his own dress; he fights with another courtier a comic duel in which not a drop of blood is shed, but the two lacerate each other's smart clothes and ornaments. Fungoso is the law-student who imitates Fastidious Brisk and ex- torts money from his father to dress like Brisk but can never keep up with his model who has always adopted a new fashion just when the copy is complete. Sordido is the miserly father and assiduous reader of almanacks, who thinks of hanging himself in order to prove the prophets wrong.

The great comedies.

 Volpone, or the Fox (1606), Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614) are the great comedies of the period of Jonson's maturity. They are also among the most remarkable of the dramatic works of the English Renaissance. In these Jonson does not merely depict different types of oddity and eccentricity. He now pays much attention to the construction of the plays and strives to make them strong. Far from drawing on old legends and tales, according to Shakespeare's habit, he invents everything, his matter, plot, and characters, which are the creation of his logical mind and the fruits of his direct observation of eccentricities. Of all these plays, it is Volpone which is the most powerful and also most in the tradition of the old morality plays. It is a violent attack on cupidity and mean avarice and Machiavellism. (It is reminiscent of Marlowe's extravagance in depicting the character of the Jew in The Jew of Malta). Volpone depicts only vices, and hardly anything that could be called virtue. Thus the view it gives of human nature is thoroughly cynical.

Characters in "Volpone".

 Volpone is a Venetian magnifico, old, rich, childless, and a passionate believer in every form of enjoyment, particularly the enjoyment of gold. Surrounded by false friends anxious of inherit his wealth, he pretends that he is dying, and by persuading each of them that he is the sole heir-designate obtains costly presents from them all. Any one of them, out of a feverish greed equal to Volpone's own, is capable of sacrificing honour, child, or wife to his chance of acquiring the inheritance. These persons who could be compared to beasts of prey are appropriately named- the lawyer, Voltore or Vulture, the dying Corbaccio or Old Crow, and the merchant, Corvino or Little Crow. The intermediary between Volpone and these other persons in Mosca (or Fly), Volpone's parasite and a man of infinite resource. There is something ravenous and diabolic in the passion of all these charac- ters. Volpone's thirst for gold is as vehement, if not as biting, as that which torments Marlowe's Jew of Malta. Yet the enormity of the fraud he has organised gives him greater pleasure even than his gold. For sheer ferocity, no scene has ever surpassed that in which the aged, crippled, blear-eyed Corbaccio, with one foot in the grave, comes to sniff at the body of the man whose death he has discounted, or the other scene in which Corvino who drags his chaste wife, Celia, by threats and violence, to the presence of Volpone who has made her surrender to him a condition for leaving all his property to Corbaccio. In yet another and no less ferocious scene, Volpone, who has been given up to justice, is shown standing his trial. Each of his dupes comes for-. ward to speak for him, each of them warmly eloquent. Each improves on the statement of his rival, and invents the most hateful lies, even against a son or a wife, to prove Volpone's innocence.

"Volpone" devoid of fun.

The inhuman situation, which is the subject of this play, is made almost credible by the dramatist's vigour, his clever manipulation of the threads of his plot, and the strong construction. But its success is devoid of the element of fun, for the ferocity of the satire excludes laughter.

A well-made comedy.

In Epicoene or the Silent Woman, however, Jonson aims at producing mirth. For once he sacrifices his moral design in order to please his public. Some scenes in his plays are intended, he says,

for ladies, some for lords, knights squires;

Some for your waiting- wench, and city wires;

Some for your men, and daughters of Whitefriars.

Jonson's theme is no longer a damnable vice, but a whim, an oddity. Fundamentally Epicoene is of the nature of a farce, but it is at least as robustly constructed as Volpone, although Dryden regarded it as the model of a well- made comedy. The chief character is Morose, an egoistical bachelor who would nowadays be called a neurasthenic. His special humour is his hatred of noise. He lives in a blind alley, and makes war on all who cry their wares in the streets, has his front door muffled, keeps his shutters closed, and quilts his staircase. His servants have orders to answer him only with sings and ges- tures. His own voice is the only sound he will tolerate.

The plot.

The subject of this comedy is Morose's marriage to a young girl reputed to be always silent. He marries her in order to disinherit his nephew whom he has begun to dislike. But the girl has been secretly chosen by this mischievous nephew, and she is no sooner married to Morose than she proves talkative and noisy in the extreme. The wedding is an excuse for a boisterous noise which maddens the old man. He wants a divorce before the day is out, and excuses for it are vainly sought in a grotesque consultation with pre- tended lawyers. Finally, the nephew agrees to save his uncle in return for a fair sum of money, paid cash down, and reveals that the bride is a boy dis- guised for the occasion.

Farce and learning.

The situation lends itself to scenes of pure clown- ing. Morose is surrounded by a miscellaneous company, all as noisy as they can be a barber, a coxcomb, an amateur of sports, and a whole society of ridiculous persons. But even when he is writing farce, Jonson is weighted with his learned reading. The fruits of his observation mingle strangely with curiosities he has gathered from the ancients. He lacks spontaneity; he is too industrious and too learned to evoke light laughter.

A theme of lasting interest.

 The Alchemist is another satirical comedy. Here, again, Jonson denounces rogues. Fáce, a servant, brings a swindler named Sbtle to his master's house during the master's absence. Subtle poses as an alchemist and the hope of the philosopher's stone causes men of every kind to call on him- a lawyer's clerk, a tobacconist, and a great gentleman, Sir Epicure Mammon who is constantly pre-occupied by dreams of magnificence and voluptuous desires. Among these seekers after gold are two Puritan breth- ren of Amsterdam who give the playwright his first real chance to ridicule the sect* hostile to the stage. This play is remarkably constructed. Unlike its pre- decessors, it has a theme of lasting interest- the exploitation of the foolish and the wicked by unscrupulous rogues who dazzle them with riches. Prominence in the play is chiefl, gives to the rhetoric of Sir Epicure and to the intrigues of the Puritans. The whole of this sect is resumed in the sinuous, politic, and adroit pastor. Tribulation Wholesome, and in the stupid, violent, uncompro- mising deacon Ananias whom, not without difficulty, the pastor forces to accept the doctrine that the end justifies the means. Ananias is horrified at the thought of taking the help of a pagan like Subtle, but Tribulation reproaches him for ill-timed religious zeal, and pictures to him their sect enriched and made powerful by gold, no longer compelled to resort to petty intrigues to obtain money. Finally, after prayer and fasting, the Puritan brethren of Amsterdam decide to avail the alchemist's services. In the end the dupers and the dupes are duly punished.

An attack on Puritanism.

Bartholomew Fair is another attack on Puri- tanism. The chief character is Rabbi Zeal-of-the -Land Busy, a man of low origin who has acquired a great renown for sanctity and who has been able to win the confidence of the well-to-do Widow Purecraft until nothing is done in her household without his advice. Thus, when Mrs. Littlewit, the daughter of the house, is filled with a desire to eat pig at the fair, Busy's consent is first asked and is given on condition that the pig "be eaten with a reformed mouth". Everyone then sets out for the fair, where Busy drinks liquor more than any- one else, and in a state of intoxication upsets a hawker's basket of ginger- bread, which he calls a "basket of popery". He is put in the stocks, and con- cludes by interrupting a puppet-show which he regards as a symbol of the public stage, that abomination of abominations. Jonson certainly wrote nothing more entertaining than this play. It would, however, have acquired more entertainment value if he had drawn his Puritan more decidedly, and if he had not made him, by turns or simultaneously, an errant hypocrite and an enthusiast as convinced as ridiculous. He should have chosen one of these alternatives. Similarly, his Mistress Purecraft is both a good and pious dupe and an intriguing widow to home religion is a means to re-marriage. These inconsistencies spoil the most animated and swarming, although far from the noblest, of Jonson's plays. The fair gives him an excuse for introducing a whole crowd of sharpers, vagabonds, and ruffians and a whole rabble of boobies, oddities, and madcaps who haunt the stalls. All his comedies are rich in details taken from life and glimpses of actual manners, but no other so much as Bartholomew Fair.

Last plays.

It was the last of his great comedies. After its appearance he stopped working for the stage for nine years, and resumed play-writing as an older and enfeebled man of diminished powers, producing five further plays. They are The Devil is an Ass (1616), The Staple of the News (1625), The New Inn (1629), The Magnetic Lady (1632), and A Tale of a Tub (1633). They are mediocre in quality, but the observation they show of manners and passing fashions makes them interesting to this day to the social historian.

*The sect here refers to the Puritans who regarded the theatre as immoral and were therefore opposed to the stage.

"The philosopher's stone was supposed to have the virtue of converting base metals into gold. Of course, no such stone actually existed. Alchemy was the science concerned with the discovery of a process by which to change base metals into gold.