Volpone and Other Plays

VOLPONE AND OTHER PLAYS

BEN JONSON
was born in 1572, the posthumous son of a minister, and thanks to an unknown patron was educated at Westminster School. After this he was for a brief time apprenticed to his stepfather as a bricklayer. He served as a soldier in the Low Countries and married sometime between 1592 and 1595. In 1597 he began to work for Henslowe's company as a player and playwright and during the following two years two groundbreaking comedies,
Every Man in his Humour
and
Every Man out of his Humour
, were produced. These were followed by
Cynthia's Revels
(1600) and
The Poetaster
(1601). Jonson's great run of comedies consists of
Volpone
(1606),
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman
(1609),
The Alchemist
(1610) and
Bartholomew Fair
(1614). In addition to his comic writing Jonson also produced two powerful Roman tragedies,
Sejanus, his Fall
(1603) and
Catiline, his Conspiracy
(1611). After 1616 Jonson abandoned the public theatre for a decade, concentrating his efforts entirely on the court masques, a form of entertainment that reached its highest elaboration in his hands, and his sporadic returns to comic drama in the Caroline period met with less popular success than his Jacobean masterpieces. In 1616 he was granted a royal pension and made, in effect, Poet Laureate. His latter years were unhappy, though. Under Charles I he lost favour and was replaced as masque-writer after quarrelling with Inigo Jones, the masque-designer. He also suffered from paralysis and was unable to publish the second volume of his
Workes
. Ben Jonson died on 6 August 1637.

MICHAEL JAMIESON
studied at the University of Aberdeen, Princeton University, and King's College, Cambridge. He was on the staff of the University of Keele for two years before going to the University of Sussex in 1962 as a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies. He has also taught at the University of Rome and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has published a study of
As You Like It
and articles on Elizabethan acting and on modern theatres for Shakespeare.

BEN JONSON

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

MICHAEL JAMIESON

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This collection published in the Penguin English Library 1966
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1985 as
Three Comedies
Reprinted under present title 2004
6

Introduction and Notes copyright © Michael Jamieson, 1966
All rights reserved

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… Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learnèd sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.

T
HIS
, I suppose, is the context in which many of us as school-children first came upon the mere name of Ben Jonson. It occurs in John Milton's
L' Allegro
, in that passage where the poet, talking of the nocturnal pleasures of city life, enthuses over the comic theatre. It is ironic that the second line, which contains Milton's tribute to the master of English comedy, should have become a puzzling allusion which young minds are required to explain at O-level. Yet Jonson belongs with those writers whom one is often expected to know about rather than to have read.

I was fortunate in that I next came upon Jonson in the theatre, when Donald Wolfit was playing Volpone and relishing that archpredator's sardonic villainies. That Jonson could still be a great entertainer came as a revelation. He belongs on the boards, as Milton indeed was suggesting in the expression ‘well-trod stage', but the doubly allusive lines from
L' Allegro
seem, from the way in which they demand foot-noting, sadly symbolic of Jonson's reputation among readers today. The ‘learnèd socks' are the slippers Greek and Roman actors wore in comedies; in these lines Jonson, the classically erudite writer of comedy, is epitomized in an allusion from the theatre of the Ancients by a poet of even greater classical erudition. But Milton expected his readers to recognize also a graceful compliment to Ben Jonson, for in this author's own poem in Shakespeare's memory prefaced to the First Folio, ‘sock' is similarly used:

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,

From thence to honour thee I would not seek

For names; but call forth thund' ring Aeschylus.

Euripides, and Sophocles to us….

Or, when thy socks were on,

Leave thee alone, for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

In Milton's four lines we seem to find several aspects of Jonson which are daunting to the general reader of books – his classicism, his great learning, his tendency (like Milton with ‘learnèd sock') to need explanatory notes, and, of course, his complete contrast to William Shakespeare. Milton is, in fact, praising Jonson, placing him first, and being, if anything, condescending about Shakespeare. But that is not how the lines strike us at first reading today, for we put a higher value than Milton did on spontaneity, and are quick to sniff pedantry in a ‘classical' writer. There
is
something daunting about Jonson's present-day reputation; and anyone introducing a volume of his plays has to begin by stressing what ought to be obvious – that his three best comedies are still very funny, that they make splendid reading, and that they are vivid, lucid, and marvellously actable stage-plays.

Critics have already dwelt, a shade lugubriously, on this daunting aspect of Jonson's work. In 1919 T. S. Eliot wrote:

The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries – this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.
¹

In 1938 Professor Harry Levin continued in a similar vein:

Ben Jonson's position, three hundred years after his death, is more than secure; it might almost be called impregnable. He is still the greatest unread English author.… Jonson has always had more attention from antiquarians than from critics, and has too often served as a cadaver over which to read a lecture on the lore of language and custom.
²

And in 1948 Edmund Wilson commented, just as bleakly:

… among a thousand people, say, who have some knowledge and love of Shakespeare, and even some taste for Webster and Marlowe, I doubt whether you could find half a dozen who have any enthusiasm for Jonson or who have seriously read his plays. T. S. Eliot, admitting the long neglect into which Ben Jonson's work had fallen, put up… a strong plea for Jonson as an artist, and thus made a respect for this poet
de rigueur
in literary circles. But one's impression is that what people have read has been, not Jonson, but Eliot's essay.
¹

Readers are still put off by talk of Jonson's monumental learning and by the constant, artificial twinning, as in Milton's lines, of a Jonson laboriously theoretical and a Shakespeare effortlessly inspired. Many critical discussions of Jonsonian comedy are bedevilled by the fact that writers on Shakespeare use Jonson as the convenient representative writer of ‘classical' comedy, in order to contrast that
genre
with the richer Shakespearean comedy exemplified in
Twelfth Night
,
As You Like It
, or
The Tempest
. Jonson's two great comedies,
Volpone
and
The Alchemist
, are not examples of a kind of play which is inherently inferior to Shakespearean comedy. They are comic masterpieces in their own right, but in a different tradition. Jonson's best work for the theatre operates within narrow limits; it does not have the diversity of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies. The three plays reprinted here are the best three – though a case could be made for displacing
Bartholomew Fair
with
The Silent Woman –
and they are plays of the same broad, satiric scope. This makes it necessary, in the sections on individual plays, to emphasize their differences as well as their similarities, as a step towards evaluating them critically.

Jonson's biography and the critical theories behind his plays are of secondary importance, despite the facts that Jonson's was a life of compelling interest to the literary historian and that he was hugely respected in his own day as a prescriptive literary theorist. But some knowledge of the details of Jonson's life, of his theories about literary composition and about what constituted literary excellence, and of his artistic assumptions, helps to put the three comedies in perspective for modern readers and playgoers.

Jonson was a great and colourful character. He probably killed a man in a hand-to-hand fight while soldiering in the Low Countries, and he certainly killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel. He was imprisoned several times. He once worked as a bricklayer. He was a bonhomous, opinionated, and highly prized drinking companion in literary London, and the William Hickeys of this world might write him down as an
habitué
of the Mermaid Tavern, the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun, and the Apollo Room upstairs above the Old Devil. His output – as printed in his own Folio
Workes
or in the eleven stout, splendid, Oxonian volumes edited and annotated by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson – demonstrates, however, that the greater part of his crowded life must have been spent in what W. B. Yeats once called ‘the sedentary toil of creative art'. It is as a writer that he is of interest to us today, not as a personality.

Ben Jonson was born, the posthumous son of a minister, in 1572, and, thanks to an unknown patron, he was educated at one of the great schools of the day, Westminster, where the headmaster was the scholar and antiquarian, William Camden. At a time when he might have expected to go up to Cambridge or Oxford, he was apprenticed, briefly and humiliatingly, to his stepfather as a bricklayer. He served as a soldier in the Low Countries, married, and was for a time an actor. From around 1597 he wrote plays for Philip Henslowe, working on such get-penny entertainments as
Hot Anger Soon Cold
and
Richard Crookback
as well as on the superb additions to the ever-popular melodrama
The Spanish Tragedy
. His first truly Jonsonian comedies were
Everyman in his Humour
, in which William Shakespeare acted in 1598, and
Everyman out of his Humour;
both are ‘comedies of humours', in which each character is a type dominated by a ruling passion or obsession. To the complicated literary feud known as ‘The War of the Theatres' Jonson contributed
Poetaster
and he was himself attacked in
Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet
. Soon after, however, he collaborated with Chapman and one of his attackers, Marston, on a racy London comedy
Eastward Ho!
, which contained a joke (‘I ken the man weel. He's ane of my thirty pound
knights') about King James's Scots accent and his mercenary creation of knights. The collaborators were imprisoned. Yet already Jonson had won favour at Court and had created his first royal masque.
The Masque of Blackness
. He became the greatest English writer and contriver of these splendid Renaissance entertainments, producing thirty-three for King James, and inventing the grotesque comic interlude, the anti-masque. In most of these he collaborated with the famous architect and stage-designer, Inigo Jones, whose spectacular scenes and machines were later to eclipse Jonson's poetry and songs.