Horatian satire in Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage". Boehrer, Bruce.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Wayne State University Press

THE FINAL POEM in Ben Jonson's single book of Epigrammes (c. 1612), "On the Famous Voyage" has presented readers with special problems relative to its form, context, and subject-matter. On the formal level, its massive length (at 196 lines, it is over four times as long as the second-largest poem in the collection) and mock-heroic narrative render questionable its presence within a volume of epigrams. (1) On the contextual level, its placement at the end of the Epigrammes lends it a peculiar prominence which is further reinforced by its general failure to conform to the alternating encomiastic and condemnatory structure of the poems that precede it. (2) And on the level of content, many (perhaps most) readers have found it simply disgusting. The tale of two Londoners who hire an open boat to row them up the sewage-clogged Fleet Ditch roi:' a visit to a Holborn whorehouse, "On the Famous Voyage" has been denounced as a "hideous and unsavory burlesque," (3) as "the plunge of a Parisian diver into a cesspool," (4) as a "morceau repugnant [de] grossierete rabelaisienne," (5) and as any number of other unpleasant things.

Typically, commentators on the poem have sought to resolve these problems in ways that interfere with one another. Efforts to deal with the question of form have tended to aggravate the questions of context and content; attempts to resolve the question of context have exacerbated the questions of content and form; and so forth. Peter Medine, for instance, has addressed the impropriety of the poem's subject-matter by casting it as "a serious indictment of the times" in which it was written. (6) This reading has the advantage of accounting for the epigram's coprology in a relatively dignified way, justifying it as the traditional language of satirical condemnation, However, in the quarter century since its appearance, Medine's reading has not achieved much popularity, in large part because it so completely mistakes the tone of Jonson's poem, which--as generations of readers have noted (7)--is more "good-natured" (8) than censorious, more playful than denunciatory. When Jonson wanted to attack individuals (Inigo Jones, Marston and Dekker, etc.) or social practices (the sensationalism of news-sheets, Puritan antitheatricalism, etc.), he generally left no doubt about what he was doing. Thus Medine's solution to the problem of the poem's subject-matter simply intensifies the problems of the poem's form and context.

Conversely, Wesley Trimpi has addressed the problem of the poem's form in a way that foregrounds the concomitant problems of context and content. For Trimpi, the mock-heroic structure of "On the Famous Voyage" comprises a satirical attack not upon bad people or bad manners, but upon bad writing, which it denounces implicitly by way of parody. Thus the unwieldy length of this particular poem can be understood as an embodiment of everything that Jonson's verse repudiates elsewhere; its "scatological burlesque of mythological allegory" points by inference toward the "purity of idiom" Jonson achieved in his other works through an emphasis on plainness of diction and simplicity of style. (9) But if this is the case, then why does "On the Famous Voyage" differ so markedly from those other of Jonson's Epigrammes that deal with bad writing? Poems like "To Play-Wright" (Epigrammes 49), "To Old-End Gatherer" (Epigrammes 53), "On Poet-Ape" (Epigrammes 56), "On Play-Wright" (Epigrammes 68), "To Proule the Plagiary" (Epigrammes 81), and "On Play-Wright" (Epigrammes 100) all condemn various offenses against literature, yet none of them deviates from the stylistic concision of the Epigrammes in general, nor does any of these poems leave the reader to infer that it is an attack upon literary malpractice. (10) Indeed, the first epigram "To Play-Wright" (Epigrammes 49) goes so far as to insist that the "obscene" (4) verses preferred by its subject have no place in Jonson's own "chast booke" (6)--a claim that, if anything, makes "On the Famous Voyage" seem more out of place than ever.

More recently, John Mulryan has accounted for this contextual problem by arguing that Jonson's Epigrammes are of two general sorts, each embodying the stylistic ideals of a different classical precursor. On one hand, according to Mulryan, the majority of the Epigrammes "substitute ... the serene voice of Horace for the mocking jeers of Martial, a voice characterized by restraint, human sympathy, and understated eloquence"; on the other hand, however, Jonson did feel it necessary to imitate Martial, the greatest of Latin epigrammatists, by "including some scurrilous or quasi-obscene epigrams" among his own exercises in the form. (11) This assessment of Jonson's collection echoes Arthur Marotti's influential description of the poet as "an artistic schizophrenic, with both a Dionysian and an Apollonian side," (12) these sides of his productivity being represented on the level of classical influence by the figures of Martial and Horace, respectively. Moreover, this view of things creates a potential space for "On the Famous Voyage" among the "scurrilous or quasi-obscene" poems in Martial's vein. However, Mulryan's assessment is subject to two disadvantages with respect to matters of form and content. First, it tends to reduce Martial to the status of a scurrilous railer, despite the fact that some of Jonson's most graceful and humane verses (e.g. "Inviting a Friend to Supper" [Epigrammes 101]) are based closely upon that poet's work. And second, it presents Horace as the preeminent model for Jonson's epigrammatic voice, despite the fact that Horace himself wrote no epigrams.

In the present essay, I wish to account for the content and form of "On the Famous Voyage" by simultaneously complicating and extending Mulryan's understanding of the Epigrammes as a collection. By way of complication, I will suggest that not only was Martial capable of urbane humanity, but that Horace was likewise capable of a certain scurrility; by way of extension, I will argue that the Horatian influence upon Jonson's Epigrammes is indeed sufficiently deep--at least in the case of "On the Famous Voyage"--to interfere with the English poet's sense of classical epigrammatic structure as it derives from the work of Martial. My evidence for both of these assertions is to be found in a particular Horatian poem: number five in the first book of Horace's satires, commonly referred to as "A Journey to Brundisium." This verse narrative, written late in 38 or early in 37 B.C., when Horace was still in his twenties, is sufficiently raw in both form and content to have embarrassed many of the Roman poet's editors and commentators. Moreover, its similarities to Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" are sufficiently numerous to suggest more than coincidence. Given these similarities, I will argue that "On the Famous Voyage" represents an appropriation of Horace's satirical technique to the form of the epigram, and that this appropriation may account for the poem's problematic features.

In pursuing this argument, I will make a series of interrelated points about Jonson's epigram, points that address each of the issues of form, context, and subject-matter that I have identified above. First, as regards form, Horace's fifth satire supplies us with an analogue for much of what is peculiar about "On the Famous Voyage": its extended length, its mock-heroic character, its narrative structure. As to context: if we view "On the Famous Voyage" as an effort to adapt Horace's satirical voice to the task of writing epigram, we can thereby account for its refusal to conform to the structures of encomium and condemnation that govern most of the poems in Jonson's collection, and that derive in both instances from the work not of Horace but of Martial. In this respect the placement of "On the Famous Voyage" at the end of Jonson's Epigrammes is also appropriate, for if this poem comprises an attempt to move beyond the Martialian model of epigram in a direction suggested by Horace, then it might properly form the endpoint of a volume of verse inspired for the most part by the former poet. And finally, in regard to the notorious obscenity of Jonson's poem, Horace's fifth satire might stand as a reminder that even the most dignified and respected of classical authors were subject to similar outbursts--and that, in fact, the condemnation of such subject-matter may well say more about readers than about writers.

Horace's Satire 1.5 is a product of the poet's early career, describing a journey he took to Brundisium in 38 B.C., in the company of his patron Maecenas and other followers of Octavius Caesar. The purpose of the trip (although not made plain in Horace's verse) was for Maecenas to meet with Mark Antony in order to resolve differences between him and Octavius and cement their political and military alliance against Sextus Pompeius, as was indeed done in the agreement of Tarentum of 37 B.C. (13) Maecenas's ultimate destination on this embassy was Athens; however, he was accompanied as far as Brundisium by Horace and a number of other literary companions, most notably Virgil. In the 104 lines of his fifth satire, Horace commemorates the trip with a catalogue of travel-related inconveniences and inanities, the whole presented in a spare style with little obvious effort at any deliberate shaping of the narrative. When the party finally reaches Brundisium--which is not even, after all, the ultimate objective of the journey in hand--Horace's story simply stops.

Of the numerous similarities between "A Journey to Brundisium" and "On the Famous Voyage," one might start by noting that these poems have elicited much the same critical reaction, which might be characterized as a mixture of bewilderment and condemnation. While Jonson's most influential twentieth-century editors have described "On the Famous Voyage" as "a bad joke," (14) Horace's editors and readers have variously depicted Satire 1.5 as a catalogue of "trivialities" that "falls short to a surprising degree of the account which we should expect Horace to give" of the event in question; (15) as "a compilation of scanty notes from a diary"; (16) and as "small beer". (17) A. Y. Campbell summarizes this view of things with an air of finality:

   Considering the occasion, and still more the persons ... it would, one
   would think, have been impossible to write an account that should be for
   posterity quite uninteresting. But Horace has surely come as near to that
   as he or anybody could. (18)

Although Horace's poem generally lacks the boisterous and offensive scatologicalquality of "On the Famous Voyage," it does begin with a noteworthy bout of diarrhea; (19) moreover, its treatment of sexual matters is sufficiently bald to render them "embarrassing to later admirers." (20) And Horace's focus upon gnats and frogs, sour wine and bad food, rustic buffoons and dyspepsia certainly achieves much the same rhetorical effect as does Jonson's alimentary fixation in "On the Famous Voyage"; it lowers the overall tone of the narrative, presenting events, as it were, from a gutter's-eye view of the world. To this extent, Horace's satire and Jonson's epigram have proven similarly resistant to efforts at critical appreciation.

This, in turn, is arguably so because these two poems share a wide range of formal and structural traits. To touch upon just the most obvious of these: both works are extended verse narratives dealing with travel; both introduce mock-heroic formulae so as to render their subject-matter especially ridiculous; both involve an element of sexual motivation and frustration; and both conclude inconclusively. These points of likeness become additionally intriguing when one considers that Horace's fifth satire was apparently composed in the spirit of literary rivalry; it parodies the third book of Lucilius's Satires (119-16 B.C.), which has survived in fragments and was entirely given over to an account of a journey from Rome to the straits of Sicily. (21) (Lucilius's own satire also appears to have been composed as a parody of sorts, in this case of Accius and perhaps of Ennius. (22)) As we have seen, Wesley Trimpi's influential discussion of the plain style in Jonsonian verse would construe "On the Famous Voyage," likewise, as parody. But as parody, "On the Famous Voyage"--unlike the satires of Horace and Lucilius--lacks any announced literary object, and this is one of the points that make it difficult to accept Trimpi's formulation. When Jonson chose to engage in parody--as, for instance, with his treatment of Hero and Leander in Act 5 of Bartholomew Fair (1614)--the results could be as robust as they were recognizable; nor was there any shortage of turgid heroic verse for Jonson to lampoon. (Scholars have also suggested that Jonson's epigram is a caricature of Book 6 of the Aeneid, (23) of one of Sir Thomas More's scatological epigrams, (24) and of Sir John Harington's Metamorphosis of Ajax; (25) however, none of these works offers the array of formal correspondences to be found in Horace 1.5.) (26) Thus one may suspect that "On the Famous Voyage" presents its readers with something, more nuanced than straightforward literary burlesque, and I would propose that the relevant literary model in this case should be not parody but imitatio/aemulatio. I will return to this point later.

In the meantime, however, the external similarities between Horace 1.5 and "On the Famous Voyage" deserve some review. To begin with general subject-matter: not only through the narrative specifics of "A Journey to Brundisium" but also through its self-conscious relation to Lucilius, Horace's poem positions itself as a travelogue. As the poet/protagonist makes his way down the Italian peninsula, he offers a not-so-loving documentary of the various discomforts (e.g. indigestion [1.5.7-8, 49] and sore eyes [1.5.30-31, 49]), inconveniences (sour wine [1.5.16], unreliable boats [1.5.20-21], and bad roads [1.5.96]), and follies (pretentious provincial officials [1.5.34-36] and oafish locals [1.5.51-70]) that intersperse the journey. For its part, "On the Famous Voyage" might seem relatively unconcerned with the subject of travel, its title notwithstanding: the poem's heroes, "SHELTON, and ... HEYDEN" (5), (27) never go beyond the confines of London, and to characterize their expedition as a "famous voyage" is clearly to indulge in mock-heroic hyperbole. Yet Jonson's poem, like Horace's, takes pains to invoke models of travel drawn from the contemporary social context.

In the case of Jonson's poem, indeed, these models are of more than passing interest; the fame of the "famous Voyage," as it happens, is gauged against travel practices that attract the poet's attention throughout his career. Thus Shelton and Heyden embark upon their expedition from Bridewell dock

   in worthy scorne
   Of those, that put out moneys, on returne
   From Venice, Paris, or some in-land passage
   Of six times to and fro, without embassage,
   Or him that backward went to Berwicke, or which
   Did dance the famous Morrisse, vnto Norwich.
 
(31-36)

The performer of the famous morris in question, of course, was Will Kemp, who undertook the dance as a public-relations stunt in the spring of 1600, after stepping down from his position as principal clown for the Lord Chamberlain's Men. (28) The precise identity of "him that backward went to Berwicke" is no longer clear, although references to the exploit survive, as testimony to the public notice it elicited, not only in Jonson's poem but also in Rowley's A Search for Money. (29) As to the practice of laying out money "on returne" from foreign excursions, it was widespread in Jonson's England, apparently combining an increased cultural interest in travel with the endemic Elizabethan fondness for gambling and monetary speculation. (30) In the typical such arrangement, a prospective traveler would place money with friends or associates who pledged to return it at a predetermined rate of interest, provided that the traveller in question complete his projected journey within specific time constraints and in accordance with other possible conditions.

By 1612, this last practice had left a significant mark upon Jonson's work, for in Every Man Out of His Humour (1599; printed 1600) the poet had already produced a dramatic character to satirize the very same activity. Puntarvolo, in Every Man Out, embodies a variety of foibles that include a credulous fondness for the themes and commonplaces of chivalric romance and courtly love; an unreasonable emotional attachment to his dog and cat; and a penchant for "deal[ing] upon returnes, and strange performances" ("Character of the Persons" 21). In pursuit of this last humor, Puntarvolo spends the better part of the play drumming up support for an elaborate excursion to "the Turkes court in Constantinople" (2.3.247-48)--a trip on which he is to be accompanied by his dog and his wife (when the wife eventually drops out, he proposes to replace her with his cat). Ironically enough, given his incessant talk about this fabulous journey, Puntarvolo undertakes only one actual trip in Every Man Out: from Bankside to Whitehall, in the same general northerly direction and within the same general urban enclave that delimit Shelton and Heyden's exploits in "On the Famous Voyage."

Jonson's contemptuous fascination with the practice of self-promotional travel is clear enough from his extended treatment of Puntarvolo, but this by no means exhausts his recorded interest in the subject. Every Man Out also includes a passing reference to Will Kemp (4.8.145-46) which has been taken by some as an allusion to his Norwich morris-dance. (31) Further, Jonson became involved in the self-promotional travel exploits of Thomas Coryate, to whose Crudities (1611)--a self-deprecating narrative of the author's walking trip through Europe--he contributed introductory verses of an ironic cast, together with a humorous prose "Character" of Coryate (Ungathered Verse 10-12). (32) And in 1618-19, Jonson himself undertook a well-publicized walking trip from London to-Scotland, only to find with some annoyance that his itinerary was being shadowed by another writer, John Taylor the Water Poet. (33) Taylor, as it happened, regularly undertook self-promotional travel ventures of this sort, for which he solicited subscribers to whom he then sold a narrative, in verse and prose, of the journey in question. (34) Thus, virtually throughout his career, Jonson displays a persistent and ambivalent interest in the various modes of publicized travel that vied for the attention of readers and newsmongers in early modern London.

If we accept the poet's plain invitation to read Shelton and Heyden's famous voyage in light of such events, we are left with a poem whose satirical element cannot be reduced--as Trimpi, for one, would do--to the status of literary parody, but that also encompasses the forms and conventions of contemporary travel. As it happens, this is precisely the mode of satire within which Horace's "Journey to Brundisium" also operates. Various classicists have noted that, despite its obvious reference to Lucilius, Horace's poem is far more than a simple literary burlesque; that in fact "Horace's dependence [upon Lucilius] was not great;" (35) and that "the aemulatio Lucilii is but one of the satirist's many aims in Satires I.5 and should not, therefore, be singled out as the satire's `primary' or `only' intention." (36) To this extent, Horace's poem offers readers a particularly clear antecedent for the satirical project of "On the Famous Voyage," which entails a certain measure of involvement with--and definition against--literary precursors, but which also engages broadly with nonliterary subjects while likewise positioning itself within the overall genre of contemporary travel-narrative. The highly specific character of these literary qualities suggests not only that Horace's and Jonson's poems share a rare and coincidental family likeness, but also that the latter stands to the former in a conscious relation of imitation and response.

Moreover, this pattern of resemblance is rendered still more striking by the prominent appearance of mock-heroic topoi and diction in both poems. Horace's "Journey to Brundisium" comes most vividly to life when the narrator recounts a mock-epic contest of wits staged for the benefit of his travelling-party at a villa near the town of Claudium. The principals in this agon are two "semi-professional jesters" (37)--one a member of Maecenas's entourage, the other a local clown specially provided for the occasion--who taunt each other for the company's amusement and are in turn taunted by the self-conscious grandiosity of Horace's verse:

   Now, O Muse, recount in brief the contest of Sarmentus the jester
   and Messius Cicirrus, and the lineage of the two who engaged in the
   fray. Messius was of famous stock, an Oscan; the mistress of
   Sarmentus
   is still living: from such ancestry sprung, they entered the lists.
 
   Nunc mihi paucis
   armenti scurrae pugnam Messique Cicirri,
   Musa, velim memores, et quo patre natus uterque
   contulerit litis. Messi clarum genus Osci;
   Sarmenti domina exstat: ab his maioribus orti
   ad pugnam venere.
 
(1.5.51-56)

Part of the joke here derives from the discrepancy between Horace's lofty poetic vein and the nature of the combat it describes, to say nothing of the identity of the combatants. (The Oscans were popularly derided for their congenital dim-wittedness, which here furnishes an appropriate intellectual counterpart to the social standing of the ex-slave Sarmentus.) Likewise, "On the Famous Voyage" opens with a mock-heroic invocation whose extravagance at once suggests how short the poem's subject-matter will fall of its style:

   No more let Greece her bolder fables tell
   Of HERCVLES, or THESEVS going to hell,
   ORPHEVS, VLYSSES: or the Latine Muse,
   With tales of Troyes just knight, our faiths abuse:
   We haue a SHELTON, and a HEYDEN got,
   Had power to act, what they to faine had not.

One durable impediment to a clear understanding of Jonson's poem derives from the fact that the poem itself contains so little information about its protagonists. Aside from their surnames, readers learn only that one of the two is a knight (22-23). Consequently it becomes somewhat easier to account for Horace's Sarmentus and Cicirrus, both as historical personages and as units of meaning within their story, than it is to deal with Jonson's two heroes. Sarmentus has generally been identified as a freedman attached to Maecenas's household, (38) and it is apparent from context that both he and Cicirrus serve as objects of satirical condescension and contempt for Horace. With Shelton and Heyden the questions both of identity and of narrative function become trickier; however, their role as mock-heroic protagonists renders them structurally parallel to Sarmentus and Cicirrus while also pointing to an asymmetry of correspondence between the poems these characters inhabit. Where Horace's combatants enliven a small central piece of the overall narrative (nineteen out of 104 lines), Shelton and Heyden are central to the entire action of "On the Famous Voyage," with the result that Jonson's epigram becomes a kind of hypertrophied synecdoche of Horace's satire. This fact, in turn, may speak on one hand to the enduring critical sense that the mock-heroic episode of "A Journey to Brundisium" is perhaps the most noteworthy part of Horace's poem; (39) on the other, it might also comprise a response to Horace's own parodic technique in Satire 1.5, which proceeds largely by way of reduction and condensation. Where Lucilius allowed a single satire to consume the entire third book of his works, Horace responds by "strip[ping] his account to the bare essentials, eliminating the verbal excess, repetitions, and elaborate descriptions that are apparent in nearly all the extant remains of Lucilius Book 3." (40) In effect, where Horace's "Journey to Brundisium" has reduced a book of Lucilian' satire to 104 lines, one could argue that Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" has expanded Horace's 104 lines into 196. In the process, Jonson has relied heavily upon the inflationary propensities of mock-heroic language, which thus becomes the central organizational trope not only of a single episode within his poem, but of the poem in its entirety.

In a number of more incidental respects, one also encounters a noteworthy level of correspondence between Horace's and Jonson's narratives. A prominent means of transportation (albeit not the only one) in Horace's poem is the open boat, whose discomforts receive sustained description, particularly with regard to the laziness and profanity of the boatmen:

   Slaves loudly rail at boatmen, boatmen at slaves: "Bring to here!" "You're
   packing in hundreds!" "Stay, that's enough!" What with collecting fares and
   harnessing the mule a whole hour slips away. Cursed gnats and frogs of the
   fens drive off sleep, the boatman, steeped in sour wine, singing the while
   of the girl he left behind, and a passenger taking up the refrain. The
   passenger at last tires and falls asleep, and the lazy boatman turns his
   mule out to graze, ties the reins to a stone, and falls a-snoring on his
   back. Day was now dawning when we find that our craft was not under way,
   until one hot-headed fellow jumps out, and with willow cudgel bangs mule
   and boatman on back and head.
 
   Pueri nautis, pueris convicia nautae
   ingerere: "huc appelle!" "trecentos inseries." "ohe,
   iam satis est." dum aes exigitur, dum mula ligatur,
   tota abit hora. mali culices ranaeque palustres
   avertunt somnos, absentem ut cantat amicam
   multa prolutus vappa nauta atque viator
   certatim, tandem fessus dormire viator
   incipit ac missae pastum retinacula mulae
   nauta piger saxo religat stertitque supinus.
   iamque dies aderat, nil cum procedere lintrem
   sentimus, donec cerebrosus prosilit unus
   ac mulae nautaeque caput lumbosque saligno
   fuste dolat.
 
(11-23)

This testy description, with its "mall culices ranaeque palustres" and its drunken ferryman, its fare-taking and its references to sleep, frames Horace's journey through a series of light heroic and infernal associations. (41) These recur with more emphasis in "On the Famous Voyage," whose narrator repeatedly alludes to the Acheronian frogs of classical myth ("Arses were heard to croak, in stead of frogs" [13]; "what croaking sound/Is this we hear? of frogs?" [91-92]), while describing Shelton and Heyden's equally-feckless boatmen as a "brace of CHARONS" (87). Indeed, the opening of Horace's satire anticipates some of the poem's later investment in mock-heroic formulae, (42) by casting its travelogue in the form of an epic visit to the underworld; this conceit, in turn, becomes central to "On the Famous Voyage," which presents the Fleet Ditch as "exemplary of the this-world origin of Hell." (43)

Later in Satire 1.5, Maecenas and his party depart the town of Fundi and "its `praetor' Aufidius Luscus ... with delight, laughing at the crazy clerk's gewgaws, his bordered robe, broad stripe, and pan of charcoal" ("Fundos Aufidio Lusco praetore libenter/linquimus, insania ridentes praemia scribae,/ praetextam et latum clavum prunaeque vatillum" [1.5.34-36]). The travelers' delight on this occasion is clearly inspired by the "praetor" Aufidius, actually an aedile with pretensions, whose display of the senatorial purple and the sacrificial charcoal-pan render him ridiculous. Conversely, as Shelton and Heyden make their way up the Fleet Ditch, in place of a pretentious official they encounter a pretentious watercraft: a "liter" (85) so large that it threatens to crush the adventurers' open boat and that exudes, as it passes, an odor of unsurpassed foulness. Yet, as the poem's narrative voice encouragingly observes, this same barge undergoes a surprising annual transformation, for it is regularly spruced up to participate in the Lord Mayor's pageant: "One day in the yeere, for sweet 'tis voyc't,/And that is when it is the Lord Majors foist" (119-20). In effect, thus, Jonson's barge repeats on the nautical level the trope of inappropriate social aspiration exemplified, on the political level, by Horace's Aufidius.

As Horace's narrative winds down, however, it addresses aspirations of another order entirely--the sexual desires of the protagonist/narrator--that once again find a structural concomitant in Jonson's verse. As Maecenas's party finally enters Apulia, it stops for the night at a villa near Trivicum:

   Here I, utter fool that I am, await a faithless girl right up to
   midnight.
   However, sleep carries me off still thinking upon love; then my
   dreams stain my nightshirt and my belly with their uncleanliness.
 
   Hic ego mendacem stultissimus usque puellam
   ad mediam noctem exspecto: somnus tamen aufert
   intentum veneri; tum immundo somnia visu
   nocturnam vestem maculant ventremque supinam.
 
(1.5.82-85; translation adjusted)

For many readers, this moment of unexpected sexual explicitness drives the general grittiness of Horace's satire beyond the pale of propriety. (44) If the narrator's wet dream contributes to any overall narrative pattern, it is by serving as the (anti)climactic item in a rambling catalogue of desultory frustrations.

While Horace's satire may verge on indecency, Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" revels in it. Of course, the vast majority of the epigram's rudeness manifests itself in the vein of scatology, but the poem's excremental fixation is actually occasioned by its broader sexual context. For as it happens, Shelton and Heyden have not hit upon the plan of rowing to Holborn by coincidence; they, like the poet/narrator of Horace's "Journey to Brundisium," find themselves in a state of heightened erotic expectation. Their excursion begins among the brothels of the Bankside liberty, which happen to be temporarily closed due to tidal flooding ("It was the day, what time the powerfull Moone / Makes the poore Banck-side creature wet it' shoone,/In it' owne hall" [29-31]). As a result of this inconvenience, Shelton and Heyden arrange for their trip to Holborn--another area of London renowned for its prostitution--where they intend to visit the brothel of "MADAME CAESAR, great PROSERPINA" (180), a well-known contemporary bawd. (45) However, after undergoing the difficulties of their passage up the Fleet, they discover that Madame Caesar "Is now from home" (181), and so, the doors of her establishment closed against them, Shelton and Heyden go "brauely backe [to Bankside], without protraction" (192).

Not only does this sequence of events introduce into Jonson's epigram an element of erotic disappointment similar to that endured by the narrator of Horace's "Journey to Brundisium"; it also renders explicit the parallelism, latent in Horace's poem, between sexual and textual frustrations. As Horace nears the end of his journey, and the end of his poetic narrative, he experiences the tantalizing promise of a sexual consummation that fails to materialize. This moment of coitus interruptus, in turn, anticipates the discursus interruptus with which the poem itself concludes. Reaching Brundisium, Horace--and hence Horace's narrative--simply drops out of the ongoing story; indeed, even the poet's own personal excursion, which inevitably involves a return to the city of Rome, remains only half-finished at the end of the satire. By the same token, Jonson's Shelton and Heyden end their poem with a sexual disappointment (Madame Caesar's absence from her house) and an impending return-trip to their place of embarkation, which disappointment and return are linguistically elided in a concluding image of the two heroes going "brauely back, without protraction" (192). Here the lack of sexual protraction and the lack of narrative protraction are explicitly superimposed upon one another, with the result that Jonson's conclusion recapitulates the anticlimactic inconclusiveness of Horace's.

3

The formal attributes of Horace's Satire 1.5 that I have enumerated above--its character as satire; its mock-heroic quality; its concern with contemporary travel, particularly by boat; its general focus on squalid subject-matter; its amused awareness of social pretension; its emphasis upon sexual frustration; its inconclusive ending, and its juxtaposition of sexual and narrative anticlimaxes--are so numerous and specific as to be nearly unique. Yet each one of them finds a counterpart in Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage." This being the case, I believe we must acknowledge that if Jonson's poem contains a parodic dimension, Horace's satire is much more probably the object of that parody than is some vaguely-defined and unexemplified notion of bad English heroic verse (as Trimpi, for instance, would have. it). But even so, I do not regard Jonson's epigram precisely as a parody of Horace's satire--or at least not entirely as such. Instead, I believe that "On the Famous Voyage" occupies an ambiguous rhetorical position between the opposed vocabularies of respectful and derisory imitation.

Among Jonson scholars, George Rowe has paid particular attention to this ambiguity, which he characterizes as the tension between literary notions of imitatio and aemulatio. Noting the centrality of imitative exercises to the early modern literary curriculum, Rowe also notes the ultimate aim of those exercises, which is to generate not likeness but distinction:

   The act of emulating is both a recognition of the importance of imitation
   and an attempt to imitate (compete) in such a way as to create (ultimately)
   difference rather than similarity, and so to establish hierarchy and order
   out of the imitative tendency toward equality and (potential) confusion. It
   is a particularly militant form of comparison whose final goal is contrast.
   (46)

One might put this point in Derridean terms by observing that there is always a trace of imitation/sameness in emulation/difference, and vice versa. Imitatio and aemulatio constitute an indissoluble dyad whose meaning derives as much from their interrelation as from their mutual antipathy.

No literary genre embodies the resulting paradox more clearly than does parody, a form that frequently seems suspended between condemnation and celebration of its objects. A quarter century ago, Jonathan Culler defined parody as a fundamentally binary genre, in which "two different [literary] orders must be held together in the mind" so as ultimately to assert "the dominance of the parodist's" order. (47) But this definition does little justice to the breadth of possibility within which the parodist's order itself may be generated. For far from offering a unified, determinate register of meaning, parody instead exhibits a wide range of potential attitudes toward its victims. These can run the gamut from a kind of puckish affection--as when the authors of Bored of the Rings declare themselves "honored to be able to make fun of such an impressive, truly masterful work of genius and imagination" as J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (48)--to a withering contempt--as when the George W. Bush parody Web site cites the President's own words in travesty of themselves, thereby implying that their banality cannot be surpassed through imitation, however professional, however inspired. (49) (Note, however, both the cheeky false deference of the former declaration and the lingering trace of respect in the latter expression of contempt, which nonetheless accords Bush's malapropisms the status of an inimitable classic.) If we read Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" as parody (or as non-parodic imitation, for that matter), we must likewise consider the precise tone of the imitation in question, and if we accept the possibility that "On the Famous Voyage" comprises an imitative response to Horace's Satire 1.5, we must acknowledge that we deal, in effect, with a parody (or imitation) of a parody (or imitation). In this arrangement, the act of parody itself simultaneously and inevitably signifies as a gesture both of repudiation and of respect. Moreover, we must also add to this complication the further impossibility of ascertaining the precise tone of Horace's own parody of Lucilius, given that Book 3 of the older poet's Satires has survived only in a smattering of fragments. Under the circumstances, the best one can say is that Jonson's relations with his classical forebears--particularly Horace--are characterized by an elaborate deference accompanied by a thinly-concealed competitiveness, this latter impulse emerging most clearly in the English poet's efforts to become (and hence, in classic oedipal fashion, to displace) his predecessors. (50)

But what would it mean, in the case of "On the Famous Voyage," to regard Jonson as the English Horace? For one thing, it would mean that the Horace in question was not the staid, respectable, and rather colorless "Roman moralist" (51) he has tended to be for recent literary historians. (52) There can be no doubt that Jonson came to understand the ridiculous self-importance of this Horatian persona, which he lampoons through explicit association with the equally self-important, and equally ridiculous, figure of Adam Overdo in Bartholomew Fair. (53) To read "On the Famous Voyage" as an imitation of Horace is to suggest that, some three or four years prior to Bartholomew Fair, Jonson was already exploring constructions of the Roman poet that might escape this damning characterization; likewise, this view of matters may help illuminate the particular difficulty of the figure Horace in Jonson's Poetaster (1601), caught as he is between the high-minded stodginess of Virgil on one hand and the far less respectable (but far more interesting) escapades of Ovid on the other. When read in light of Horace 1.5, "On the Famous Voyage" emerges as an effort to reinflect the terms in which Jonson's Horatian self-fashioning have generally been understood. After all, if Horace really represents a via media between the chilly loftiness of Virgil and the scurrilous vivacity of Ovid (and this is clearly how he is presented in Poetaster), then why should he not seek to embody the virtues of both these poets?

Likewise, to read "On the Famous Voyage" as an Horatian exercise is to reconfigure its relation to the volume of epigrams it concludes. Scholars have often complained that this particular poem homogenizes poorly with the collection in which it appears, and their efforts to make sense of it (not least of all those discussed at the outset of this essay) have frequently sought to defend it by claiming that it is not so completely out of step with Jonson's other epigrams as it initially appears to be. But one might just as well argue that the poem's incongruity is part of its point, and if we view it as an attempt to compose epigrammatic verse upon a specifically Horatian model, its incongruity signals a deliberate departure from the Martialian structure of the poems that precede it. Where Jonson's alternating epigrams of praise and of blame follow the pattern of Martial in establishing a fundamentally bipolar world, "On the Famous Voyage" deliberately repudiates such predictable tidiness, operating simultaneously in the realms of homage and parody, imitatio and aemulatio. The resulting ambiguities have arguably frustrated readers for whom the contrasts and juxtapositions of the preceding epigrams offer a reassuring set of interpretive coordinates.

One final irony of this fact may be that, daunted by the ambiguities of "On the Famous Voyage," many readers have chosen to dismiss it as obscene. To be sure, the poem contains obscenity aplenty, if we wish to define obscenity in terms of scatalogical and sexual forthrightness. But these qualities are hardly unique to Jonson's verse. In the revulsion some critics have expressed for "On the Famous Voyage," one may discern an energy in excess of the epigram's own capacity for offense, and even in excess of the critics' own overheated Victorian sensibilities. (Swinburne, for one, protests too much when he condemns the gallicism of the poem's scatalogy.) The severity of such censure, I would suggest, is driven in part by the poem's own resistance to critical assimilation--a resistance that derives, in turn, from the poem's primary indebtedness not to Martial, but to Horace. In its Horatian overtones, as much as in its structural rejection of the epigrams that precede it and in its boisterous rudeness, "On the Famous Voyage" conforms to Mary Douglas's famous definition of waste as "matter out of place." (54) In this respect, Jonson's epigram has come to serve as a symbolic placeholder for the excremental matter that it describes in such fond detail. It is the untidy literary remnant of efforts to construct both Jonson and Horace as icons of literary purity and ethical seriousness.

Florida State University

Notes

(1.) Sara van den Berg, for instance, has observed that the "long ... mock-epic that ends" the Epigrammes "is a kind of palinode, a deliberate contrast to everything that has gone before" (The Action of Ben Jonson's Poetry [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987], 104). Similarly, Bruce Smith remarks that "On the Famous Voyage" "stretches the definition of epigram beyond recognition" ("Ben Jonson's Epigrammes: Portrait-Gallery, Theater, Commonwealth," in Studies in English Literature, 14 [1974]: 91-109, 109).

(2.) James Riddell, among others, has called attention to the fact that Jonson's Epigrammes are organized around "praiseworthy and blameworthy exemplars of a particular topic" ("The Arrangement of Ben Jonson's Epigrammes," in Studies in English Literature, 27 [1987]: 53-70, 58). Similarly, Richard C. Newton has argued that Jonson's Epigrammes "are arranged so as to maximize the deep importance of classical ideals," but that "On the Famous Voyage," by contrast with the other poems in the collection, "burlesque[s] all that on which [Jonson] has attempted to repose his trust" (Foundations of Ben Jonson's Poetic Style: Epigrammes and The Forrest [New York: Garland, 1988], 179, 178).

(3.) C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 2:339.

(4.) Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1889), 95.

(5.) Maurice Castelain, Ben Jonson, l'homme et l'oeuvre (Paris: Hachette, 1907), 765 n.

(6.) Peter Medine, "Object and Intent in Jonson's `Famous Voyage,'" Studies in English Literature, 15 (Winter 1975): 97-110, 100.

(7.) Thus J. G. Nichols has noted that "On the Famous Voyage" "is primarily a joke, and no less acceptable as a poem for that" (The Poetry of Ben Jonson [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969], 108). As van den Berg remarks, Jonson's "egregious admiration of the [poem's] voyagers allies him to them, so that the mock-epic mocks his own poetic authority" (Action, 107).

(8.) Medine, 97.

(9.) Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 171, 172.

(10.) Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52). All references to Jonson's work are to this edition and will continue to be identified by page number in the text.

(11.) "Jonson's Classicism," in Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 163-67, 168, 169.

(12.) "All about Jonson's Poetry," ELH 39, 2 (Spring 1972): 208-37, 209.

(13.) For the relation of Horace's poem to the agreement of Tarentum, see R. O. A. M. Lyne, Horace: Behind the Public Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 17-18 and 25-26.

(14.) Herford, Simpson and Simpson, 2:341.

(15.) Edward P. Morris, ed. Horace: The Satires ([1939] rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 85.

(16.) H. Rushton Fairclough, ed. and trans., Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, by Horace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 62.

(17.) D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Profile of Horace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 22.

(18.) Archibald Y. Campbell, Horace: A New Interpretation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), 166.

(19.) Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1.5.7-9. All further references to Horace's work will be to this edition and identified in the text.

(20.) Bailey, 23.

(21.) For the remnants of Lucilius's third book of satires, see F. Charpin, Lucilius: Satires, 2 vols. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1978). For Horace's use of Lucilius, see Klaus Sallmann, "Die Seltsame Reise nach Brundisium: Aufbau und Deutung der Horzsatire 1, 5," in Udo Reinhardt and Klaus Sallmann, eds., Muse Iocosa: Arbeiten aber Humor und Witz Komik und Komodie der Antike (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1974): 179-206, esp. 182-85, and Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 54-56.

(22.) Charpin, 117.

(23.) Van den Berg, 104-05.

(24.) Riddell, 66-67.

(25.) Smith, 109.

(26.) As van den Berg herself points out; any burlesque of Virgil is vitiated by the fact that Jonson decided "not to parody important episodes of Book 6" (105); indeed, as Klaus Sallmann has observed, Horace 1.5 also employs heroic formulae (204-05), and these may just as easily be the object of Jonson's imitation as are the themes of Virgil's epic. The epigram by More, while sharing Jonson's interest in matters scatological, has none of the rhetorical extension or mock-heroic narrative of "On the Famous Voyage." And while Jonson was clearly composing "On the Famous Voyage" with Harington's prose Metamorphosis in mind, that work offers no parallel to the general structure of Jonson's.

(27.) Shelton has traditionally been recognized as Sir Ralph Shelton, the dedicatee of Jonson's Epigram 119 (see Herford, Simpson, and Simpson 11:26, 30), whereas the Heyden in question has gone unidentified. Peter Medine has advanced an alternative identification of Shelton as the minor poet and translator Thomas Shelton and Heyden as the devotee of astrology Sir Christopher Heydon (100-104).

(28.) The principal surviving account of this event is Kemp's own Nine Days Wonder (1600), which he published in order further to capitalize upon the popularity of the dance itself. (Will Kemp, Kemps Nine Days Wonder (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972.)

(29.) 1609; quoted in Herford, Simpson and Simpson, 11:30, n. 35.

(30.) For a discussion of the practice of traveling upon returns, see Herford, Simpson and Simpson, 9:439-40, and also Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578-1653 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

(31.) The Reverend Alexander Dyce (ed., Kemps Nine Days Wonder (London: The Camden Society, 1840) advanced this reading in 1840 (vi), but it was unequivocally rejected by Herford and the Simpsons (3:362), for reasons that 1 have recently sought to reexamine (Bruce Boehrer, "The Case of Will Kemp's Shoes: Every Man Out of His Humour and the `Bibliographic Ego'," Ben Jonson Journal, 7 [2000]: 271-95.

(32.) For Jonson's relations with Coryate see David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966), 192, and Boles Penrose, Urbane Travellers 1591-1635 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942), 92-93.

(33.) For Jonson's trip to Scotland and the parallel trip by Taylor see Riggs, 254-57, and Capp, 19-22.

(34.) For Taylor's travel projects, see Capp, 18-28, 58-59.

(35.) Lyne, 17, n. 13.

(36.) See Kirk Freudenburg, The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 201, no. 51. For a thorough treatment of this point, see Sallmann passim, esp. 182-85, where he argues of Horace's poem that "Erschopfen kann sich der Sinn des Gedichts in der aemulatio Lucilii nicht. Zu zeigen, wie man Anerkanntes noch besser macht, ist ein Anspruch, der often oder versteckt in jeder literarischen Neuproduktion liegt (183). [The meaning of the poem cannot be exhausted with a reference to the aemulatio Lucilii. Every new literary product aims to show that it can do better than those that have already achieved recognition.] This rule applies as well to Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage."

(37.) Morris, 91, n. 51-70.

(38.) Susan Treggiari, Roman Freedmen during the Late Republic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 271-72.

(39.) Freudenburg notes that the mock-heroic exchange is "the largest single description in [Horace's] satire" (203); for Rudd, this episode is "the centre of the poem and provides a diversion from the travelogue" (63).

(40.) Freudenburg, 201.

(41.) Sallmann, 188-89.

(42.) See Morris, 87, n. 8, n. 9-10.

(43.) Michael McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations: The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 41.

(44.) See for instance, Bailey, 23; the Loeb translation renders the passage euphemistically, while Morris's edition of Horace simply omits the lines in question. However, one should note that Horace's sexual explicitness extends to other poems as well; for instance, see David Armstrong, Horace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 33-36.

(45.) Jonson mentions Madame Caesar in The Alchemist (1610; 5.4. 142) as well. This play and "On the Famous Voyage" were probably composed roughly within a year of one another.

(46.) George E. Rowe, Distinguishing Jonson: Imitation, Rivalry, and the Direction of a Dramatic Career (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 21.

(47.) Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 152, 154.

(48.) Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney, Bored of the Rings (1969; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), xiv-xv.

(49.) www.spring.net/yapp-bin/public/read/politics/20.

(50.) The classic formulation of such literary aggression is to be found, of course, in Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) (passim). In addition to Rowe, Thomas Greene, in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 277-328, and Richard Peterson, in Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) (passim) have devoted sustained attention to Jonson's patterns of classical imitation. For Peterson (and for Greene, to a lesser extent), this practice is less competitive than deferential, so that "the poetic mode which most strikingly calls forth in Jonson the activity of imitation is that of praise (Peterson, 2).

(51.) Katharine Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 6.

(52.) Among recent commentators on Jonson's relations to classical antiquity, Maus emphasizes his debt to "ethically serious writers" (5)--specifically "Seneca, Horace, Tacitus, Cicero, Juvenal, Quintilian, and a few others" (3)--who extol such "austere" virtues as "temperance, self-reliance, fortitude, [and] altruistic self-sacrifice" (5). As should be clear by now, this is not really the Horace of Satire 1.5. Richard Helgerson, by contrast, has argued that "what we notice most is the poor fit" of Jonson's self-identification with Horace," which obstructs the fact that "Jonson was close not to the laureate patterns of antiquity but to the literature of his own generation" (Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], 103). Again, this argument obviously depends upon the precise understanding of Horatian laureateship from which it proceeds.

(53.) The groundbreaking study of classical overtones in the character of Adam Overdo is Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 204-13, for whom Overdo "sees himself as a member of an apocalyptic senate of the just and wise, surrounded by his`friends' Cicero, Persius, Ovid, Horace, and Epictetus" (204).

(54.) See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 58.