Liberty and History in Jonson's Invitation to Supper. CUMMINGS, ROBERT.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Rice University

To night, graue sir, both my poore house, and I Doe equally desire your companie.

In Epigram 101, Ben Jonson invites a friend to supper. [1] The location of the supper is not given, the date is unknown, and the friend is unnamed. Probability favors the place as Jonson's house in St. Anne's, Blackfriars, and a date sometime before 1613. [2] Of more import is the identity of the friend. That the schedule for the evening includes readings from historians makes it plausible, if no more, that the grave guest should have been a historian. Jonson's old master at Westminster, William Camden ("Than thee the Age sees not that thing more graue") or, of an age with Camden, the translator of Tacitus, Sir Henry Savile ("grave, and truly letter'd"), are likely candidates. [3] One is as likely as the other. Both appear elsewhere in the Epigrams in poems which are explicitly celebrations of history, "(t)hat dares not write things false, nor hide things true." [4] They are allowed a public face there and addressed by name--appropriately in a collection where only villains are regularly deprived of their na mes. In Epigram 101, a poem seemingly preoccupied with frankness, the friend remains anonymous and the villains are named. But this is a poem occupied also, and more crucially, with bad faith; and whoever is celebrated here is made secure from it by the poem's reticence.

The poem may indeed be one of Jonson's "masterpieces on generalized situations" and it may be that there is no real dinner; it may even be so that the anonymity of the guest allows readers to suppose themselves the "grave" invited ones. [5] There are, however, oddities of tone in Jonson's invitation which suggest a motive or an occasion, which, even if not properly specifiable at this distance, would have been specifiable by the properly invited guest. The poem's oddities relate most obviously to its conclusion. But the very fact that the poem seems to be constituted by the details of the menu--so matter-of-factly offered, so apparently uninterfered with--is an oddity. The poem's reticence about what is going on, its being overtaken by an accumulation of named foodstuffs, is unprecedented in English. At least it is unprecedented outside satirical fantasy. Its affinities are almost with such more familiar mock menus as Volpone's wooing Celia with "The heads of parrats, tongues of nightingales,/The braines of peacoks, and of estriches," or Sir Epicure Mammon wooing Doll Common with "mullets,/Sous'd in high-countrey wines...phesants egges...cockles, boild in siluer shells." [6] But the specificities of "Inviting a Friend to Supper" suggest something graver. The "(b)ig fatt man, that spake in ryme" and who deplored meatless hospitality might have written a

celebration of eating; but he has not. [7] No one has any difficulty in agreeing with Thomas Greene that the poem's "real subject" has nothing to do with the accumulation of dishes. [8] For a start, it celebrates only an imaginary excess. While no one counts any costs, Jonson is surely not taking on himself the role of the bounteous host. The menu, which half-promises so much, qualifies its own extravagance with labored documentary honesty.

I

Jonson's poem has a gravity appropriate to the "grave sir" he invites. Wesley Trimpi invites us to hear in the poem "the flexible control of a potentially swift movement" and Ian Donaldson has to repunctuate it so as to liberate its "intimate liveliness." It is "swift" and "intimate" as invitations to enjoy oneself might be, "happy, familiar, unmisgiving" as Leigh Hunt judged the passage about wine (lines 30-2) actually to be. [9] But it is these things only potentially. Most readers enjoy the poem's easiness of manner. But why, however flexibly, does Jonson impose the control? The poem's components might be appropriate, though only just so, in an ordinary invitation to supper, but their articulation comes to strike readers as something very much contrived. The invitation begins and ends on the same word, making a circle of prospect ("To night ... I ... desire your companie") and anticipated retrospect ("No simple word...shall make vs sad next morning: or affright / The libertie, that wee'll enioy to night") . [10] Though it seems to conform with the disingenuous awkwardness that Stanley Fish makes typical of Jonson's manner, the confidence of the artifice cancels any imputation of anxiety to the host. [11] It argues serenely for the conditions of desirable company--it is, by implication, "the definition of a friend," says Trimpi, "not of a dinner." [12]

The poem's formality removes it from the immediate arena of social relations. And its conventionality marks it off from the discourse of invitations. It is, like many of Jonson's poems, a cento--a thing, in Camden's phrase, "quilted as it were out of shreds of divers Poets." [13] It affects to be, as it were, a translation. It offers itself to be read through the poems from which it derives, and it invites us to recognize its imposition on reality. The debts are accordingly heavily marked. In this case, as is well known, the shreds are chiefly out of three poems by Martial. [14] Of these, one (10.48) may be germinal for Jonson, but that there is no clear priority among them may suggest that Jonson is quite self-consciously reworking the commonplaces of a genre--the invitation poem--of whose integrity he has a strong sense. [15] The poem's way of proceeding is owing to Martial. The relevant epigrams consist in elaborated lists of foodstuffs--with main courses of varying promise, from sausages and beans (5.78) to "fat birds from the yard or the fens" (11.52), but with the emphasis regularly on salads (lettuce and leeks, olives, peas, fish and eggs, boiled lupins, mallows). The character of Jonson's meal is different; but the idea of the menu--poetically difficult and unusual--is a marker of the particular conventionality of Jonson's poem. It makes the poem read not as a letter to a friend inviting him to supper, a letter such as we ourselves might ideally send but, rather, as a poem like Martial's invitation poems. The food, however Englished it may be, is rendered as something to be remembered from other poems, not something to be eaten.

It is this conventionality which allows Jonson's debt to Martial and the rest to be generalized as a debt to an ethos. [16] Beginning with Trimpi, critics often invoke the Leges Conviviales, themselves made up of shreds of Horace and Martial, as a gloss on the poem. [17] These laws and the poems they draw on describe the norms of proper hospitality: the guests are learned, civil, merry, the food is prepared more for delight than cost, there is no rowdiness, the cups make no guilty men. The rules mark the space of the meal as an intimate version of the models of social economy Jonson outlines in the estate poems, which themselves belong to a genre which he invents or resurrects or colors his own way. "Inviting a Friend to Supper" is a declaration, therefore, of more than an ethos of hospitality. The special coloring of Jonson's invitation greatly extends its reference. "A mannerly belly is a great part of a man's liberty," says Seneca. [18] The pretended modesties of the good host are important in the context Seneca intends, but Jonson's mannerliness is defined not by restraint but by freedom and excess. Plutarch quotes Epaminondas on the advantage of his own frugal table: "Such a borde never receyveth any treason." [19] But Jonson's promised supper is not frugal at all, and its freedoms are promoted in defiance of threats to them. The ethical point (more obvious in Horace or Juvenal than in Martial) of the poems on which Jonson relies is customarily derived from the fact that simplicity, modesty, poverty, innocent mirth, and the country, are set against extravagance, sumptuousness, business, and the city. But, though they are certainly acknowledged in Jonson's opening lines--"my poore house, and I," and the offering of "(s)omething, which, else, could hope for no esteeme,"--they bear not at all on how the poem proceeds. Seneca talks of liberty, Plutarch of treason. Jonson's concern is with these too, but he does not imagine the one secured by plain living, or the other avoided. Whereas Martial concludes 10.48 wi th the promise that "there shall be no liberty that would alarm you next morning, nothing said that you should wish unsaid" (lines 21-2), making a point about the protocols of friendship and hospitality and about holding back, Jonson advises the enjoyment of liberty and the absence of threats to it:

No simple word,

That shall be vtter'd at our mirthfull boord,

Shall make vs sad next morning: or affright

The libertie, that wee'll enioy to night.

(lines 39-42)

Where Martial's guests are not to be alarmed by the prospect of the supper's excess, Jonson's guest is not to be alarmed by the constraints of the world outside.

II

The pressure of reading the poem as a manifesto of plain-living virtue bends the facts. Indeed, readers of the poem have been unable to say what the facts are. Trimpi implies that the meal is simple; Thomas M. Greene calls it "professedly simple." [20] Such descriptions are misleading. Doubtless we should distinguish a meal such as Jonson might actually have given from the imagined meal. [21] The meal apparently guaranteed is indeed modest: olives, capers, mutton, cheese, and fruit. But the meal imagined, and lied about "so you will come" (a phrase borrowed from Martial 11.52) is a different thing altogether. The menu, as Michael Schoenfeldt puts it, "oscillates between paucity and plenty with perplexing frequency." [22] But the imaginary meal of plenty dominates the poem and is itself obviously dominated by the poultry, and this of a kind which, as Schoenfeldt briefly notes, is "reserved for the tables of the nobility." [23] Jonson acknowledges the improbability: he will share with his guests "a short-leg'd hen"--if they can get her, and "though, fowle now, be scarce, yet there are clarkes, / The skie not falling, thinke we may haue larkes," he lies about the partridge and pheasant and woodcock "of which some / May yet be there," he promises godwit "if we can," and knot, rail, and ruff along with it (lines 11-20). The "Ginny hen" and the "Ionian God-wit" are emblems of luxury already in Horace's Epode 2. [24] The expense involved here is certainly beyond Jonson. Such a list would ordinarily argue a deplorable bias to pretentious luxury. In Philip Massinger's City Madam, a servant complains that his newly rich master, once content with vegetables and butcher's meat, now splashes out on poultry. [25] And Jonson's is not modest poultry. The rail, says Michael Drayton, "seldome comes, but upon Rich mens spits"; the godwit, says Thomas Browne, is "the daintiest dish in England, and I think for the bigness--the bigness of the price." [26] Prices fluctuate, and the price of game fluctuates more than the price of most things, so that, without knowing the date of the supper precisely, the meal cannot be priced. But the price of game is regularly high: in 1605, a pheasant cost as much as a lamb and, in 1612, it cost as much as half a hundredweight of beef. [27] Sir Amorous La Foole's preferences (a proposed supper is based on "a brace of fat does... half a dozen pheasants, a dozen or two of godwits, and some other fowl") signal his folly. [28] Similar ones signal degeneracy: George Wither whips the taste for

Partrich, Phesant, Plouer, Quaile,

Or any dainty fowle that may delight

Their gluttenous and beastly appetite. [29]

When Sir Epicure Mammon, in The Alchemist, says that his footboy shall eat pheasants and knots and godwits, even he intends a hyperbole, rapt as he is in his own fantasy of the tongues of carps and dormice, camels' heels, and the beards of barbels. [30] Even these parodies of extravagance have something of the character of Jonson's imaginary meal.

Evidence about the extravagance of the English table comes mainly from the satirists and the moralists: "Lucullus Ghost walks still," says Robert Burton. [31] But no one reads Jonson's poem as an indictment of high living, and there is another way of looking at excess, which Jonson invites. His is not the excess of Lucullus or Trimalchio, an excess of kickshaws. Its abundance is manly, and truly English. William Harrison's Description of England promotes a view of England swimming in superfluity: "Neither are we so miserable in England...as to dine or sup with a quarter of hen, or to make so great a repast with a cockscomb as they do in other countries; but if occasion serve, the whole carcasses of many capons, hens, pigeons and suchlike do oft go to wrack, beside beef, mutton, veal, and lamb, all which at every feast are taken for necessary dishes amongst the commonalty of England." [32] This abundance is cause for national pride: the complained of extravagance is the employment of "musical headed Frenchmen and strangers" to prepare the native meats. [33] The proper English meal is bulky arid uninterfered with. Jonson actually disclaims responsibility for the pastries at his supper among the "aught ... which I know not of." [34] Away from foreign interference, an abundance even of poultry, rather than beef, may be admirable. But Jonson's purse would certainly not have allowed him messes of rare birds. When Sir William Petre entertained Queen Elizabeth at Ingatestone Hall near Chelmsford in the 1560s, he matched Jonson's abundance and variety by buying not only from the poulters in London, but by sending his own men out to Ely, Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Kent. [35] A meal like that, fit for a princess, becomes a metaphor of the kingdom.

So, with Jonson, the meal becomes a metaphor. It shares in the poetical overkill of Drayton's bringing together in the same Lincolnshire river island and at the same time the plover, the quail, rail, and the peewit, and the godwit, and the stint, and the knot. [36] But Drayton is celebrating England's wonders, not composing a supper party menu. There is an analogous overemphasis in some contemporary Dutch painting where market and kitchen scenes give prominence to huge pyramids of dead birds and meat. [37] The motives of such paintings are often ostensibly moral (or so the titles suggest), but the pretended moral narratives are threatened or overwhelmed by the comestibles. In a culture that is genuinely unhungry, we can pause to enjoy the beauty of superfluity. Even real food might be offered to guests for show only: John Donne's patron James Hay, Lord Doncaster was among those responsible for the vogue for so-called "ante-suppers," lavish displays to be discarded before the meal to be eaten was laid. [38] B ut the aestheticization, as happens in Dutch painting, of scenes originally intended to enforce morals about thrift or prodigality permits a different kind of resonance, not moral in any ordinary sense, but sentimental.

Henry of Huntingdon, whose work was edited by Savile, begins his history of the English by observing that Britain is an island "blessed with game and wildfowl," and, four hundred years later, Harrison can still remark on the abundance of game as somehow typically English: "there is no nation under the sun which hath...more plenty of wild fowl than we." [39] But, at the same time, Harrison observes that there have been shortages at least from the days of King John (and therefore of Henry of Huntingdon). Jonson sets his abundant imaginary menu alongside the concession that "fowle, now, be scarce." The supply of game was vulnerable to freaks of the weather and to overhunting. And, importantly, its availability was vulnerable to the legislation designed to protect it. [40] In 1600, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor of London forbidding the sale of pheasants and partridges, "provisions not meet for common persons nor to be sold by poulters"; and they wrote again in the early years of James's reign, when p rohibitions against the taking of game (mainly venison) were strenuously enforced and long unenforced penalties attached to illegal hunting were revived. [41] "It is not fit that clowns should have these sports," James tells Parliament; and, in a proclamation of 1610, he reflects that, in hunting game, "people might... presume of more libertie than became them." [42] But the protection of the royal prerogative, even in this apparently marginal matter, becomes construable as an attack on popular liberties. It is in this context that the politically indifferent Burton defends the people's interest against "the great men" who go about "starving men to feed beasts, and punishing in the meane time such a man that shall molest their game, more severely then him that is otherwise a common hacker, or a notorious theefe." [43] Keith Thomas describes popular resistance (and legally informed resistance) to the extension of property rights into the world of God's creation: when, in the 1640s, parliamentary troopers were called to account for damage done to Baron Trevor's dove house in Leamington "they answered him that pigeons were fowls of the air given to the sons of men, and all men had a common right in them that could get them." [44] Jonson's imaginary menu asserts the common rights of the sons of men to the fowls of the air.

The birds represent an England no longer enjoyed, or, enjoyed only in privileged places, immune from the burden of modernity. At Sir Robert Wroth's Durrants, the hunt occupies all the year in a landscape filled every season with different game; [45] at Sir Robert Sidney's Penhurst, the wooded high ground

doth provide

The purple pheasant with the speckled side;

The painted partridge lies in every field. [46]

Drayton's Lincolnshire, with its various "fleets for fowl" has been mentioned. [47] Camden gives this Lincolnshire abundance a distinctively English inflexion. "All this Tract-over at certaine seasons, good God, what store of foules," he writes, "is heere to be found. I meane not those vulgar birds which in other places are highly esteemed and bear a great price, as Teales, Quailes, Woodcocks, Pheasants, Partridges etc, but such as we have no Latin names for, the very delicate dainties, indeed, of service, meates for the Demigods, and greatly sought for by those that love the tooth so well, I meane, Puitts, Godwitts, Knotts, that is to say, Canutus or Knotts birds." [48] These are birds that contribute to a particular people's sense of itself--"such as we have no Latin names for." The world of fowls and fowling belongs with English origins. [49] Camden quotes in an English "softened" by the vagaries of its transmission, a grant by Edward the Confessor to one Randulph Pepperking of a forest

with heorte and hinde, doe and bocke

Hare and Foxe, catt and brocke,

Wild fowell with his flock,

Partrich, fesant hen and fesant cock

With green and wilde stob and stocke. [50]

This, he comments "was the plaine dealing, truth and simplicity of that age," meaning partly that modern legal documents do not look much like that, but meaning partly also that it summons a vision of the game on the land leased and of the manners of the Saxon gentleman. When Rembrandt, working in a related culture, represents himself with a dead bittern, it is to advertise his status as a gentleman. [51] Some readers re-imagine Jonson's poem as an invitation to the country and, given the Horatian precedents, it is a poetical plausibility. Jonson had no house in the country, poor or otherwise; but he may well remember the hospitality of Sir Robert Cotton at his estate in Huntingdon--so called, Drayton tells us, because it was "an easie hill where mirthful Hunters met." [52]

III

Poems offering invitations to the country are invitations to a dream of the primitive and carefree. In Odes 3.8, Horace invites Maecenas the imperial counsellor to lay down his worries over state affairs; in Odes 3.19, the historian Telephus is encouraged to forget the abstruse questions of chronology that normally preoccupy him, to scatter roses, to get drunk and surrender to a girl who has her eye on him; in Epistles 1.5, Torquatus, probably a lawyer, is assured that tomorrow is a holiday, that it would be venial (or even fun) to escape his obligations today, that the wine stands ready, and that the hearth is bright. Horace offers his friends the liberty that country air, or sex, or wine affords. Wine unlocks secrets, relieves burdens, and liberates the poor into a dream of riches. In Jonson's summoning, as it were, of all the birds of Lincolnshire, there is something of this merely idyllic bias, but rendered more gravely than Horace allows. "Inviting a Friend to Supper" caters for spirits in need of recre ation. The winged supper, the more especially since we do not quite believe in it as a meal, enjoys the "freer sky" where Johannes Secundus invites his old tutor to join him in one of the more famous modem specimens of the invitation poem. [53] Nothing, typically, is freer than a bird. But the spaciousness and the liberty iconized by the birds on the imaginary menu are lost to reality. Drayton makes the Avon and the Stour bewail "that deed so full of dred" that made the "boundless" site of the New Forest into a royal hunting park under the tyrannical Normans and where, as John Selden notes, King William "constituted losse of Eies punishment for taking his Venery." [54] Eating the King's venison was an act of treason. In Jonson's The Sad Shepherd, Robin Hood proposes to feast his friends on venison shot by Maid Marian; Jonson's countercultural gesture in this poem is more finely nuanced.

It is also more sharply focused. There are two kinds of bird not present at this meal. The first is the rare poultry offered in the imaginary menu (it is piquant that the Canary of which they will "sup free," while carrying the name of a bird, is not a bird at all) (lines 29-35). The second absence compensates for the first: "we will have no Poley or Parrot by" (line 36). Jonson and his guest may not enjoy all those fine pheasants and larks and birds out of the spacious fens, but they will not have to suffer Poley and Parrot (though they are a presence more probable than the missing game birds). Poley and Parrot are real people, but they have names apt for Jonson's fertile way with bird metaphors: from the "lapwing spies" in Poetaster to the parasites in Discoveries "that fly about the house all day; and picking up the filth of the house, like Pies or Swallowes, carry it to their nest (the Lords eares) and oftentimes report the lyes they have fain'd, for what they have seene and heard." [55] The poem's point lies allusively in these two missing birds: in the economy of the epigram, they justify (though by a piece of ostentatiously "false" wit) the bias to poultry in the menu. [56]

The presence of the spectral historians at the center of the poem-- Tacitus and the rest--is balanced by the absence of Poley and Parrot, who appear at the end. They are spies. History, the "light of Truth, and life of Memorie," is darkened or deadened by those who would "report the lyes they have fain'd." [57] In 1597, "in the tyme of his close imprisonment under Queen Elizabeth, his judges could gett nothing of him to all their demands bot I and No," he told William Drummond, but "they placed two damn'd Villans to catch advantage of him"; Drummond adds, "of the Spies he hath ane Epigrarme." [58] These spies are plausibly identified with Robert Poley, active as a government spy from the 1580s, and the shadowy Parrot, perhaps to be identified with Henry Parrot, author of the Springe to Catch a Woodcocke, and in the business of entrapping supposed Romanists; the epigram Drummond reports is plausibly enough identified with "Inviting a Friend to Supper." [59] Jonson's difficulties with the authorities are in an y case more or less continuous in the years following, partly in consequence of violent ill temper, partly of thinking dangerously--even, perhaps, of being a spy himself, of living under the spell of duplicity. [60] But he casts himself as misrepresented: "I have been accus'd to the Lords, to the King; and by great ones," he says; but his accusers were driven "to use invention, which was found slander." [61]

Joseph Loewenstein observes that "Inviting a Friend to Supper" ends with a meditation on liberty. [62] The liberality of the meal prepares for the subject of the meditation--as Montaigne observes, "the very name of liberality implyeth liberty." [63] And for Jonson, "liberty" implies liberty of speech--the "free truth" that he offers his intellectual father Camden in Epigram 14, the "Freedome, and Truth" he offers his "friend and son," and all the dangerous frankness that goes under the name of "comelie libertie" in friendship celebrated in his "Epistle to a Friend." [64] Jonson's private notions of liberty may seem limited and literal or too much to his own advantage: in Discoveries, "liberty" is reduced to the liberty to publish without suspicion of slander, and promoted on the back of a complaint that poets are suspect in an "Age afraid of their Liberty: And the Age is growne so tender of her fame, as she cads all writings Aspersions." [65] The honored guest, however, may have a graver notion of liberty an d the poem is to please him. At the center of the poem, Jonson proposes readings from Livy, Virgil, and Tacitus--names that sit strangely with the conies and the larks--or "some better booke" (lines 21-2). This last, sometimes thought of as Scripture, is more probably the "better worke" with which Jonson hopes Savile would bless his "glad countrey," or some such work as Camden's long-gestating Annals--the history of England rather than the history of Rome. [66] History is at the center of the poem, and history will be at the center of the supper conversation. And Jonson has friends who can give value to his vocabulary beyond what look like his own immediate intentions.

In his poem on the frontispiece of Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World, Jonson celebrates "grave Historie, / Raising the World to good or evill fame." [67] Camden writes that "the principal Business of Annals is, to preserve Vertuous Actions from being buried in Oblivion, and to deter men from either speaking or doing what is amiss, from fear of after-infamy with Posterity." [68] History is the place where experience is morally accounted. But the securing of fame and apportioning of infamy is a dangerous business, and the truthtelling and historically founded evaluation of events is easily brought into the arena with mere slander. Ralegh says, in his preface, that he might have written a history of his own times, but "who-so-euer in writing a moderne Historie, shall follow truth too neare the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth." [69] Jonson complains that he inhabits a culture where the truthtellers are vulnerable, and the characterization of the backbiters as mindless chatterers--Poley and Parr ot--does not render them less dangerous. Falsifiers of other men's speech and history, they may be "of base stuff," but they are still "lights in state," like Chev'ril threatening "the starre-chamber, and the barre," or like the "statesmen" who carry Tacitus in their pockets along with "the Gazetti, or Gallo-Belgicus," and promote a habit of talking "reseru'd, lock'd vp, and full of feare," or Sir Politique Would-be with his "grave and serious" garb, "very reserv'd and lock'd," and his "beware / You never speak a truth." [70] "Of all stiles he loved most to be named honest," says Drummond of Jonson. [71] Jonson among the poets and Camden among the historians are fastidious deployers of other men's words: Camden famously disowns the older historians' habit of inventing speeches to put in dead men's mouths. [72]

Jonson's supper is where experience is rendered briefly secure from the malice of the world. Immunity from malice and faction and special interests was more pressingly Camden's ideal than Jonson's--as Jonson would doubtless have acknowledged. Graham Parry recalls Father Augustine Baker's description of a conversation in Cotton's London library with Camden and Cotton "of antiquarian intensity free from the conventional prejudices of the age." [73] A word repeated in the wrong place would cost a life, but Camden (and Cotton and Baker) take the risk so that English monastic history should be on a surer foundation. Poley is not just the eponym of a mindless chatterer--he has a life outside his attempt to suborn Jonson. It is worth quoting Camden on Poley's insinuating himself into the company of the Babbington plotters: "a cunning Counterfeit and Dissembler, who is thought to have revealed all their consultations from day to day to Sir Francis Walsingham, and to have egged on the young Gentlemen in this desperat e Undertaking." Every day the conspirators "met in St Giles' fields, or St Paul's church or in Taverns, where they every day banquetted and feasted, being puffed up with Hope of great honours." [74] And every day, after these malign suppers, they were betrayed.

Selden inscribed on his books a motto in Greek, "Above all, liberty." He meant, says Anthony Wood, "to shew, that he would examine things and not take them on trust." [75] The distrust is typical of Camden's circle, a group made aware that special interests easily contaminated the transmission of historical evidence. For history at least in the perception of these historians, had been put to the service of special interests. Fulke Greville's Life of Sidney observes that the uses of history were less contentious in Elizabeth's day, that she did not "by any curious search after Evidence to enlarge her Prerogative Royall, teach her subjects in Parliament, by the like self-affections, to make a curious inquisition among their Records, to colour any encroaching upon the sacred circles of Monarchy." [76] As Jonson well knew, Elizabeth's goodwill was hardly guaranteed: he himself saw the inside of a prison for crossing it. But King James's surveillance of British history writing was felt as more energetic than Eliz abeth's, perhaps because it was engaged with the processes of the historians' research rather than simply its products. His interest was professional and, unfortunately, also unrefusable. The attempted revival of the Society of Antiquaries in 1614, though it was done cautiously and with the determination that "for avoiding offence, we should neither meddle with Matters of State, nor of Religion," was quickly aborted, because before its second scheduled meeting "we had notice that his Majesty took a little Mislike of our Society." [77] Even in the most generous account of the matter, King James has to be seen as suspicious of the historians' independence.

The historians' worries are nicely focused by King James's anxiety to revise his old tutor George Buchanan's version of his mother Mary's unfortunate career as Queen of Scots--a revision made possible, it seemed to him, by the histories of modern times which both the English Camden and the French Auguste de Thou had in hand. [78] The antagonism provoked by his efforts to direct their enterprises exposes on the part of the historians a preoccupation with issues of liberty remote from the particular case. Recent events in Scotland, De Thou wrote from Paris to Savile in May 1606, meaning those events which involved Queen Mary, "could perhaps still be written about with the liberty worthy a historian ('libertate historico digna') if your heroine Elizabeth were still alive"; and Savile agreed. [79] The "historian's liberty"--an extraordinary shorthand which makes it seem as if the intellectual credentials of the position could be taken for granted--consists in the right to be concerned exclusively with settling t he record. De Thou was held to have defied the King. Camden was blamed for it; and his own efforts, resumed in 1608, to write up his Annals were, in effect, frustrated. The King's confidence in his attempts to control De Thou's rewriting of history exploded when one John Pory (the name a portmanteau--but only, one supposes, fortuitously--of Poley and Parrot) revealed De Thou's privately communicated bravura statements of independence. But, in England at least, power lay with the King. Camden writes to De Thou lamenting the envy, toil, and hate that make up the historian's lot. [80] And, in the more than conventional humanist apologias of the preface to the Annales, he recalls De Thou's own vocabulary with a plea that the historian "might have an eye to the Truth onely. Neither shall any man (I trust) find lacking in me that ingenious Freedom of Speech joyned with Modesty which becometh an Historian." [81]

It is Polybius and not De Thou that Camden acknowledges in this passage, so asserting the antiquity and the continuity of this liberal notion of his calling. But it is Tacitus who is its guardian spirit. "Those Censures and Prejudices, that Hatred and Backbiting which I foresee advance their Ensigns and sound the Charge against me" did not discourage him, Camden wrote, and "As for danger I feared none, no, not from those who think the memory of succeeding ages may be extinguished by present power." He alludes here to the same passage that Jonson uses in the mouth of Arruntius in Sejanus, complaining of

the Senates brainlesse diligence,

Who thinke they can with present power, extinguish

The memorie of all succeeding times. [82]

Tacitus praises the historians of the Republic who "wrote with no less eloquence then libertie of speech," but he was himself sorrily aware of the riskiness of contemporary history writing (the lives of the emperors "they yet living, were falsely set down, for feare". [83] These English historians were nervous and resentful, alert to the anomalousness of the identification they clearly wanted between free peoples and free historians. Like Tacitus, they feared that true liberty was available only in a remote past: "For wee the flowre of the British nobility, and seated therfore the furthermost in, sawe neuer the coasts of the countreyes which seine in slauery, even our eyes kept vnpolluted, and free from all contagion of tyrannie. Beyonde us is no lande, beside us none are free." [84] The British Caractacus stands in for the Englishman regretting his lost freedoms. And, as the historian of primitive German liberties, Tacitus is close to the hearts of English historians of Jonson's generation--at their most ext reme, but perhaps also their most Jonsonian, in Richard Verstegan, who finds an appropriate heritage for Englishmen in the history of a people "neuer subdued by any," a people who "could not flatter," a people known for "their most free and bountifull hospitalitie." [85] The traditions of Saxon liberties, which succeeded British ones, are reckoned enshrined in the procedures of English common law, "a maine and first part of liberty" after the Norman Conquest, says Selden, but they are worth holding on to because they represent a people morally superior to ourselves "(as our Germans in Tacitus) so Stoicall, as not to care for the future, having provision for the present, from natures liberality." [86] Their liberty and their liberality go together, as they do in some doggerel Camden quotes from the twelfth-century Alfred of Beverley "in the praise of our native countrie" to the effect that the English are a free people, freehearted, free-spoken and, better yet, freehanded. [87] The English are preserved longer than most from modernity by keeping in touch with this past, certainly through the traditions of the law (which is at the center of the historical effort of the generation of Cotton and Selden), but also through a sentimentally colored inquiry into early history Jonson celebrates the virtues of this primitivism in his historian friends. Camden's "sight in searching the most antique springs," Selden's searching "the Fountaines, Sources, Creekes." [88] But it is the French historian who most thoroughly forgets his modernity: in 1612, under pressure from the British king, De Thou wrote from Paris to Isaac Casaubon in London that he saw himself as an ancient Gaul preserving the freedom his father taught him, and that he had hardened himself against both the slanders and the favors of the Court, and that his comfort and happiness were in his "conscience." [89]

After his release from prison in 1605, Jonson "banqueted all his friends, there was Camden, Selden and others." [90] He celebrated an obvious kind of liberty. It is another sense of liberty that is invoked in "Inviting a Friend to Supper." Among the primitive liberality of Jonson's table improbably heaped with wildfowl, there is recreated the spirit of the primitive generous hunting and fowling people. And with that liberality there is implied, in the rhetoric of the epigram, the liberty of the historians who celebrate it. The supper is in the foreground, but the description of it is animated by the preoccupations of Jonson's guest. This animation is threatened by a countervision, but it is also confirmed by it, for the invitation to enjoyments is complicated by a quite specific sense of the fragility of the enjoyments. The "libertie, that wee'll enjoy to night" is defined by the constraints insistently elsewhere present. Jonson and his unnamed guest were not likely to enjoy what once they might have. The im aginary menu comes out of a lost England, the modest real one is the best they could now do. By 1620, Jonson had fallen into a despair less coherent than Camden's gravity might have commanded. "Friend, flie from hence," he wrote, persuading his friend to the wars,

and let these kindled rimes

Light thee from hell on earth: where flatterers, spies,

Informers, Masters both of Arts and lies;

Lewd slanderers, soft whisperers that let blood

The life ... with the infinite more

Praevaricators swarme. [91]

Robert Cummings teaches English literature at the University of Glasgow. He has recently edited Seventeenth-Century Poetry in the Blackwell's Annotated Anthologies series.

NOTES

(1.) Epigraph is taken from Ben Jonson, Epigram 101, in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 8:64-5, lines 1-2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Jonson come from this edition. Inclusive page numbers will be given on first references to works. Thereafter, only line citations will be noted.

(2.) Herford and Simpson take the date to be after 1607(1:31, n. 1). David Riggs (Ben Jonson: A Life [Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989], pp. 230-1) supposes the likely place Jonson's House in Blackfriars, and the date 1605-12, before and after which he is reckoned to have been living with Lord Aubigny. Ian Donaldson (Jonson's Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], pp. 61-2) suggests Jonson may have migrated back and forth between his own house and Aubigny's throughout this period. Although Joseph Loewenstein ("The Jonsonian Corpulence; or the Poet as Mouthpiece," ELH 53,3 [Fall 1986]:491-518,503) entertains a date "long before 1605," a date late in the range 1607-12 is more likely.

(3.) Herford and Simpson's commentary suggests these names (Jonson, 11:20). The compliment to William Camden is in Jonson's Epigram 14 (8:31, line 5). Camden's chorographical masterpiece, Britannia, was published first in 1586 and its last revision in 1607. His supplementary Remaines was published in 1605. He first began working on the Annales in 1596 but abandoned the work, and he resumed it only in 1608. The first part was published in 1615. The compliment to Sir Henry Savile is in Jonson's Timber, or Discoveries (8:555-649, line 912). John Selden, too young to be a "grave sir," is celebrated (along with Sir John Hayward) in Jonson's "An Epistle to Master John Selden" (8:158-61).

(4.) Jonson, Epigram 95, "To Sir Henry Savile," 8:61-2, 62, line 36.

(5.) Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 172. Thomas M. Greene (The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982], p. 281) makes the point about anonymity. Gordon Williams (Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], pp.7-8 and 103-4) discusses the difficulties of taking Horace's Epistles 15 and Odes 3.8 as real invitations from Horace to Torquatus and Maecenas. See also the outline of the invitation tradition in R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 244-5, on Horace, Odes 1.20 to Maecenas.

(6.) Jonson, Volpone, III.vii.202-3(5:11-136);Jonson, The Alchemist, IV.i156-8(5:283-407). Jonson's is not the kind of surreal meal whose appeal consists simply in fantasy like the dancing olla podrida in his Neptune's Triumph, lines 240-1 (7:675-700), or Lickfinger's olla podrida in his The Staple of News, III.iii.29-31 (6:339). On surreal menus, see Noel Malcolm, The Origins of Nonsense (London: Harper Collins, 1997), pp. 92-3 and pp. 253-8, where he gives the seventeenth-century balladeer Martin Parker's Bill of Fare.

(7.) Francis Andrewes so describes him, quoted in Jonson, 11:388. Jonson's own references to his fatness are legion. Bruce Thomas Boehrer ("Renaissance Overeating: The Sad Case of Ben Jonson," PMLA 105, 5 [October 1990]: 1071-82) gives a good account of them. Boehrer has extended his account in The Fury of Men's Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

(8.) Greene, p. 280. Ambitiously generalized accounts of what the poem is about include Robert C. Evans, "'Inviting a Friend to Svpper': Ben Jonson, Friendship, and the Poetics of Patronage," in Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 113-25; and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, "'The Mysteries of Manners, Armes, and Arts': 'Inviting a Friend to Supper' and 'To Penshurst,'" in "The Muses Common-weale": Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), pp. 62-79. Arguments about power relations between host and guest are usefully corrected by those more sympathetic to the poem's excess: see Boehrer or Loewenstein.

(9.) Trimpi, p. 185; and see Donaldson, Ben Jonson: Poems (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. xix. Donaldson's commentary on the poem cites Leigh Hunt (p. 56).

(10.) Jonson, Invitation, lines 1-2, 39-42. On Jonson's notions of circularity, see Greene's classic "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self," SEL 10, 2 (Spring 1970): 325-48. Judith Kegan Gardiner, Craftsmanship in Context: The Development of Ben Jonson's Poetry (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975), pp. 24-31, writes well on the poem's balance.

(11.) Stanley Fish, "Authors-Readers: Jonson's Community of the Same," Representations 7 (Summer 1984): 26-58.

(12.) Trimpi, p. 188. The point is elaborated in Evans.

(13.) Camden, "Certaine Poemes, or Poesies, Epigrammes," in Remains, p.11 (sig. C2r).

(14.) Martial 5.78, 10.48, 11.52.

(15.) Nisbet's Commentary on Horace (see note 5) gives the best brief account.

(16.) Trimpi, p. 187, calls invitation poems "declarations of taste as well as means." A moralizing account of Roman eating habits probably familiar to Jonson is J. G. Stuckius, Antiquitatum Convivialium Libri Tres (Zurich, 1597). Stuckius's Sacrorum Descriptio is cited in Jonson's notes on Sejanus.

(17.) Trimpi, pp. 186-7. The Leges are given in Jonson, 8:651-7. They were designed for the Apollo Room at the Devil Tavern. Ambiguously relevant is the fact that the "Apollo" was "one of [the] most stately and sumptuous halles" of the house of the infamously prodigal Lucullus: see Plutarch's "Life of Lucullus," in Plutarch's Lives ... Englished by Sir Thomas North, ed. George Wyndham, 5 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1895), 3:357-422, 422.

(18.) In the English of John Florio's Montaigne, "Of Experience," in Essayes, 3 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906), 3:416. Montaigne quotes Seneca, Epistolae Morales 123; Florio's "mannerly" translates Seneca's "moratus."

(19.) Plutarch, "Life of Lycurgus," in Plutarch's Lives, 1:118-64, 136.

(20.) Trimpi, p. 187; Greene, p. 281.

(21.) The distinction is nicely discussed by Loewenstein, p.493.

(22.) Schoenfeldt, p. 66.

(23.) Schoenfeldt, p. 67, citing Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 56.

(24.) Horace's Epode 2 is translated by Jonson as "The Praises of a Countrie life" (8:289--91, line 53).

(25.) Philip Massinger, The City Madam, in Plays and Poems, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 4:1-99, 26(I.i.147-9).

(26.) Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, in Works, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), 4:159, Song 25, line 338; Thomas Browne, Notes on the Natural History of Norfolk, in Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1931), pp. 377-94,382.

(27.) G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant or the Court of James I (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p.163, quotes from a Folger manuscript an itemized list of 30 January 1605;J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman's Food, rev. edn. (London: Pimlico, 1991), p. 109, quote a similar list for 1612. The statistical tables in The Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume 4: 1540-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 832, show average poultry prices falling in 1605 and then rising to a new peak in 1609.

(28.) Jonson, Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, 5:141-271, 176 (I.iv.46-8).

(29.) George Wither, Abuses Stript and Whipt (1622), II.i(p. 191).

(30.) Jonson, Alchemist, II.ii.80-5.

(31.) Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989-94), 1:221; for Lucullus, see note 17. And see the meal of "curious cost, and wondrous choice of cheare" in Joseph Hall's Virgidemiae (1597), III.iii.18, and Arnold Davenport's notes in The Poems of Joseph Hall (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1969), p. 187.

(32.) William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. George Edelin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1968), p. 327.

(33.) Harrison, p. 126.

(34.) Donaldson, Ben Jonson: Poems, suggests "the cook may produce a pastry surprise" adducing Neptune's Triumph, lines 89-90. Roger A. Cognard, "Jonson's 'Inviting a Friend to Supper,"' Expl 37, 3 (Spring 1979): 3-4, has proposed an influential but improbable account of the relevant lines, involving Jonson's poems being used as wrapping paper for pastries (as Martial 3.2 talks of his as wrapping paper for fish).

(35.) F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 237-43.

(36.) Drayton, Song 25, lines 334-44. Francis Willughby, Ornithologiae Libri Tres (London, 1676), p. 224, suggests that the ruff is an early summer bird, the knot a winter one; yet Jonson puts them on the same table.

(37.) Scott A. Sullivan, The Dutch Game Piece (Montclair NJ: Allenheld and Schram; Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1984), pp.6-22. And see the account in Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Collins, 1987), especially p. 155.

(38.) See R. C. Ba1d, Life of Donne(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p.432 and Akrigg, p.163.

(39.) Savile, Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores post Bedam (1596), p. 171; Harrison, p.314.

(40.) Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 276 (and the relevant notes), describes the progress of conservation legislation.

(41.) Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), no. 7, pp. 14-6. See also Acts of the Privy Council 30.238 (10 April 1600), and Calendar of State Papers: Domestic 1603-10, p. 542. The strain put by London on the national supply of game is described by F.J. Fisher, "The Development of the London Food Market, 1540-1640," Economic History Review 5, 2 (April 1935): 46-64.

(42.) Proceedings in Parliament 1610, vol. 1, ed. Elizabeth Read Foster (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 51; Stuart Royal Proclamations, no. 102, pp. 227-30.

(43.) Burton, 1:289.

(44.) Thomas, p. 49.

(45.) Jonson, "To Sir Robert Wroth," lines 23-30 (8:96-100).

(46.) Jonson, "To Penshurst," lines 28-9(8:93-6).

(47.) Drayton, Song 25, line 51.

(48.) Camden, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (1610), p. 543.

(49.) Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605), pp. 56, 63. The common prejudice had it that Homeric heroes only ate beef (though Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, book 1, chap. 25, argues they ate fowl as well).

(50.) Camden, Britain, p. 444.

(51.) H, Perry Chapman, Rembrandt's self Portraits: a Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), p. 48, takes Rembrandt's interest in the elite sport of hunting as a joke.

(52.) Jonson describes Cotton's hospitality in Jonson, "Conversations," 1:128-77, 139, lines 261-3; Drayton, Song 22, line 1630.

(53.) Johannes Secundus, Epigrammata, book 1, poem 18 ("Ad Hieronymum Suritam"), in his Opera (Leiden, 1631).

(54.) Drayton, Song 2, lines 196-200. Selden's note is at Drayton, 4:45.

(55.) Jonson, Poetaster, IV.vi.53 (4:185-325); Jonson, Discoveries, lines 1615-9.

(56.) The copyist of the manuscript miscellany which contains the only early manuscript version of Jonson's poem did not recognize the names, mistook the sense, and spoiled the joke, writing: "foole, or Parott." The mode of the joke is borrowed from Martial's 10.48. He promises his guest that anything will be forgiven him, even talk of chariot racing, the Greens and Blues. But, when Martial announces this license by naming the Greens, he seems to begin by stumbling on the Greek word for "leek" (prason) "de prasino conviva meus...loquatur"--as if he were inviting talk of the tonsile porrum mentioned earlier alongside the mallows and lettuce: the surprise for readers when they meet the complement of Green-Blue--is that it is not a vegetable at all.

(57.) The description of history comes from Jonson's "The mind of the Frontispice to a Booke," prefixed to Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World (1614), (8: 175-6, line 18).

(58.) Jonson, "Conversations," lines 259-60.

(59.) Mark Eccles, "Jonson and the Spies," RES 13, 52 (October 1937), 385-97, makes the identification and gives the fullest account of the spies. Sir Henry Parrot's Laquei ridiculosi: or Springes for Woodcocks appeared in 1612. John Taylor has two epigrams on him (6 and 31): see Taylor, All the Workes (Menston: Scolar Press, 1973), sigs. Ddd2(r) and Ddd3(r).

(60.) In 1598, he was imprisoned for murder (Jonson, 1:18), in 1599, for debt (11:572); in 1597(1:15-6), in 1601, in 1603, and again in 1605, he was in more or less serious trouble occasioned by his writing (1:30, 1:141, 1:140). His catholicism is consistently problematic. The citations for recusancy are given in Jonson, 1:220-2. B.N. De Luna, Jonson's Romish Plot. A Study of "Catiline" and Its Historical Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 115-43, makes the most of Jonson's possible involvement as a government spy. The edginess of Jonson's life is the subject of Donaldson's chapter "Jonson's Duplicity," in his Jonson's Magic Houses, pp. 47-65, and see especially pp. 54-6.

(61.) Jonson, Discoveries, lines 1335-7.

(62.) Loewenstein, p. 501.

(63.) Montaigne, "Of Coaches," in Florio's translation (as note 18), 3:150.

(64.) Jonson, "To a Friend, and Sonne," 8:241-2;Jonson, "Epistle to a Friend," 8:189-90.

(65.) Jonson, Discoveries, lines 2299-301.

(66.) Jonson, Epigram 95, lines 14-5 (8:61-2). In Martial 11.52, the guest may read his own poems even if the host does not.

(67.) Jonson, "The mind of the Frontispice to a Booke," lines 3-4.

(68.) I have quoted from the anonymous translation of 1675 used in Wallace T. MacCaffrey's selection The History of Princess Elizabeth (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1970). The quotation is from Camden's epistle "The Author to the Reader," p.7.

(69.) Sir Walter Ralegh, preface to The History of the World, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Macmillan, 1971), p.80.

(70.) Quotations are from Jonson's Epigram 59 "On Spies," Epigram 54 "On Chevr'l," and Epigram 92 "The New Crie" (8:45,44,58-9). For Sir Politique Would-be, see Volpone, IV.i.12-7.

(71.) Jonson, "Conversations," line 631.

(72.) MacCaffrey, p.6. And see Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Queen Elizabeth's First Historian: William Camden and the Beginnings of English Civil History," in Renaissance Essays (London: Fontana, 1986), p. 138.

(73.) Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 70.

(74.) MacCaffrey, pp. 229-30.

(75.) Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 3 vols. (London, 1817), 3:368.

(76.) Quoted in Parry, p.73. The Life of Sidney was written at various times before 1614.

(77.) Henry Spelman, "The Occasion of this Discourse," in English Works, ed. Edmund Gibson (1727), Part 2, pp. 69-70. And see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford Clarendon Press, 21979), pp. 28-32. D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Idolatry, and "The Light of Truth" from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 117-25, gives a more generous account of James's motives.

(78.) Auguste de Thou, De Thuani Historiae apud Jacobum I regem successu, in Thuani Historiarum Libri CXXXVIII, ed. Samuel Buckley (1733), vol. 7. See Trevor-Roper, "Queen Elizabeth's First Historian," especially pp. 126-32, and Woolf, cited above.

(79.) De Thou, pp. 6-8.

(80.) De Thou, p. 18.

(81.) Quoted in MacCaffrey, p. 5.

(82.) Jonson, Sejanus, III.472-4(4:327-486). The allusion to Tacitus is to Annals 4:34.

(83.) I quote from the versions of Tacitus in Savile's Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba; Foure Bookes of the Histories; The Life of Agricola (1591), p. 1; and Richard Greneway's Annals of Cornelius Tacitus; The Description of Germanie (1598), p. 1. Savile's note (sig. Aa[r]) on liberty of speech invokes out of Tacitus Codrus's speech on the liberties enjoyed by Livy when he praised Pompey without losing Augustus's regard, another speech appropriated by Jonson:

Great Titvs Livivs, great for eloquence,

And faith, amongst vs, in his historie,

With so great prayses Pompey did extoll,

As oft Avgvstvs call'd him a Pompeian:

Yet this not hurt their friendship

(Sejanus, III.414-8)

(84.) On the past as the haven of liberty, see Savile, Agricola 2; Caractacus's speech is at Agricola 30, quoted from Savile's Tacitus, p. 225. Camden uses this speech in Remaines, p. 179.

(85.) Verstegan, pp. 42--3,46, 50. Jonson's observations on flattery are legion, "for he would not flatter though he saw Death" ("Conversations," 1:141).

(86.) Selden on Poly-Olbion, Song 11.418 and Song 8.379 (in Drayton, 4:252, 167).

(87.) Camden, "Certaine Poemes etc," Remains, p.9 (sig. b[r]).

(88.) Jonson, Epigram 14 (line 8) and "An Epistle to Master John Selden" (line 45).

(89.) De Thou, p.23.

(90.) Jonson, "Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden" (1:128--78,140).

(91.) Jonson, "An Epistle to a Friend to Perswade him to the Warres" (8:167). On the date, which remains doubtful, see Martin Butler, "The Dates of Three Poems by Ben Jonson," HLQ 55,2 (Spring 1992): 279--94.