‘Worke it into one relish, and savour’: Jonson’s Discoveries

This chapter analyses Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries, in terms of its genre as a prose miscellany and its concentration on interrelated Jonsonian themes of ethics, politics, and rhetorical style. In particular, it locates Discoveries within the classical and Renaissance miscellany traditions and argues that Jonson’s imitations, borrowings, and adaptations of others’ works in this piece are characteristic of his authorial practice in multiple ways. The purpose of Discoveries, it is argued, is to represent Jonson’s humanistic process of self-fashioning through creative assimilation of texts by other authoritative writers. A governing trope in this discussion is that of the ‘Senecan bee’ that goes from flower to flower, taking nectar from each and assimilating it all into something sweet, nourishing, and new. Jonson’s approving invocation of this metaphor makes it an apt emblem of his own approach to composition. The chapter also surveys critical opinion on the degree to which Discoveries is a finished work, and on Jonson’s intentions for it.

Epigrams and The Forest

Jonson’s first two collections of poetry, Epigrams and The Forest, were instrumental in creating a new and influential style of English poetry in the early seventeenth century. This chapter explores the exemplary and satirical functions of Epigrams, reading them in the light of Jonson’s relationships with the poems’ recipients and subjects, his epideictic poetics, and his opinions on ‘the old way and the true’ to write epigrammatically. Emphasizing their circulation first as manuscript texts and subsequently as part of Jonson’s printed Works (1616), the chapter examines the importance the poems attach to ‘naming’ the virtuous and praiseworthy, and to effecting moral reformation through satire. Comparing The Forest, a shorter but more generically diverse collection than Epigrams, it shows how the two works can be read as companion pieces exploring the nature of poetry, power, and relationships.

Plays 1598–1603

The chapter begins by marking out the boundaries of ‘early Jonson’ with reference to theatre history and bibliography, before providing recorded responses to Jonson in the contemporary theatre. It identifies 1597 as a key year in his dramatic development, particularly pointing to the influence of George Chapman on Jonson’s playwriting and on popular London theatre more generally. The Case Is Altered, Jonson’s first extant performed play, is analysed in detail, with special attention paid to his presentation of households on the stage (the carefully delineated status of the steward, his lord, and other servants), and integral use of properties, costume and objects in stage business. The conclusion points to Jonson’s skill in crafting little worlds within the theatre, and in bringing London onto the stage.

Jonson and Performance

For Una Ellis-Fermor, there is a ‘deeply inherent non-dramatic principle’ in the drama of Ben Jonson, a fundamental dislike of theatricality, and a pursuit instead of ‘psychological truth’. Conversely, theatre directors such as Sam Mendes see Jonson’s plays as beautifully engineered blueprints for performance, and locate the psychological truth of Jonson precisely in performance on the stage. This chapter considers current approaches to the whole question of Jonson in performance. It examines the idea of an antitheatrical Jonson, rooted in Jonson’s own critical writings and developed by Ellis-Fermor, Herford and Simpson, and Jonas A. Barish, among others. It contrasts that with the more theatre-friendly version of Jonson which informs much recent performance criticism. The chapter builds up to a reading of the metatheatrical and performance aspects of the most often staged Jonson play of all: Volpone.

‘Extraordinarie & Rare’

Scholars have established Jonson’s art, reputation, and character almost entirely through study of his works in print in early quartos and the 1616 and 1640 Folios and thus have largely failed to investigate how Jonson composed his works in manuscript and how these manuscripts were copied, circulated, and used in the transmission of his texts, including into print. Thus Jonson’s careful, and often painstaking, construction of himself in manuscript form in his own time, which was widely imitated in manuscript form by his later readers, remains marginalized in the modern age, which continues to privilege print. This study of his many extant autograph and scribal manuscripts suggests that rather than being uniquely fastidious and flawless in composing his texts, Jonson considered writing to be a fluid, incomplete, and unstructured process that never seemed to end, and thus he composed and transmitted his texts to the playhouse and to printers in the same way as his contemporaries and colleagues.

Range and Innovation in Jonson’s Staging

This review of Jonson’s staging methods in eight plays over 34 years in five theatres suggests that he was persistently innovative and creative. He adapted his plays to different types of theatre and made his decisions about staging match the differing objectives he set himself within the plays. It shows that he could write on a large scale as well as for intimate situations, and that he created stage events which involved complex movement and intricate actions. He was always aware of the need to entertain his audiences as well as being concerned to stimulate their thinking, and in order to do this he used a range of staging devices including metatheatrical presentation, onstage commentary, and the creation of an imagined space offstage. Such devices could be simple and adaptable to different situations, but at times he also located stage action quite specifically to real places in London.

Jonson’s Miscellaneous Verse

This chapter discusses Ben Jonson’s miscellaneous poems, numbering about fifty or so, and how they might fit very neatly into a conventional critical narrative about his career, a narrative that traditionally focuses on the print publication of his folio Workes (1616). It considers the possible reasons why these poems were omitted from print, whether they tell a story of their own, and whether reading them as a group tells us anything about Jonson’s poetic career, and his preoccupations and prejudices. It also examines poems that are concerned with the dynamics of friendship and dedication, including those written for Michael Drayton, Nicholas Breton, and William Shakespeare. It suggests that Jonson’s miscellaneous poetry is a miscellaneous group and should not be read as a singular collection.

Jonson’s Reception

This chapter surveys Jonson’s impact on the nineteenth century, tracing out his substantial influence on poets, novelists and theatre professionals on the page and on the stage. In 1990, D. H. Craig wrote: ‘Jonson’s work, for the nineteenth century, was bafflingly inconsistent.’ This chapter, looking in detail at the way in which writers such as Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope interacted with and learned from Jonson, argues that his work did offer a consistent point of departure for important trends in nineteenth-century writing. By examining such specific encounters, and the work done by William Poel in reviving Jonson’s plays for the professional theatre at the end of the century, this chapter continues to reshape our sense both of the power and persistence of Jonson’s literary influence in the centuries after his death.

‘High-Piled Books, in Charactr’y’

This chapter explores Ben Jonson’s court masques, suggesting that they may well have constituted a kind of epic project on the poet’s part. The masque was a spectacle of music, costume, choreography, songs, and recited poetry performed before the King and other important spectators such as foreign ambassadors. Jonson’s long career as poet to the kings and queens of the Stuart and Caroline courts led to his being commissioned to write some twenty-eight masques between 1605 and 1631. This chapter considers the extent to which Jonson exploited the masque performance in print, his masque texts as exercise in ekphrasis, the significance of the anti-masque, the role of poets and poetry in the founding of stable government and order, and Jonson’s borrowings from epic.

Plays 1616–1637

This chapter summarizes the historical reputation of Ben Jonson’s final works for the public stage during the late Jacobean era and the beginning of the Caroline period, c.1616–37. It incorporates current lines of research and discussion into a reading of each text, and argues for their particular value as examples of acute, sometimes critical, always entertaining dramatic commentary on early modern mores and topical subjects. It suggests, with specific reference to The Staple of News (1626) and A Tale of A Tub (1633), that Jonson paid continued and visible attention to his role and responsibilities as an author positioned at the intersection of the public sphere and the republic of letters.