Critic: L. C. Knights

Source: Drama & Society in the Age of Jonson, Barnes and Noble, 1937, pp. 179- 99

[In the following excerpts, Knights examines the use of literary and cultural tradition in Jonson's plays, stressing his individuality.]

     Recent revivals of Volpone and The Alchemist occasioned some surprise—surprise that they were such good "theater."  The general impression seems to have been that in these plays Jonson had, somehow, triumphed over his "weight of classical learning," had in fact forgotten it, and had provided some very good fun instead of his usual pedantries. It may not be quite fair to the dramatic critics to suggest that their delight at being entertained instead of bored showed how little Jonson is read, but certainly the reception given to those plays implied a still widespread misconception both of Jonson's intrinsic merits and of the extent and kind of his indebtedness to the Classics.

Ben Jonson is a very great poet--more finely endowed, I think, than any who succeeded him in the seventeenth century--and he read deliberately and widely. It was to be expected, therefore, that the effects of his reading would be in some manner present in his verse. Dryden said of him that he was a learned plagiary of all the ancients: "you track him everywhere in their snow." But this, the common view, violently distorts the sense in which Jonson is "traditional"; it not only makes him appear to owe to the Greek and Latin writers a mere accumulation of thoughts and phrases, it completely hides the native springs of his vitality. The aim of this chapter is to correct the perspective, to show that Jonson's art in intimaately related to the popular tradition of individual and social morality.

[The] appreciation of Jonson starts from the appreciation of his verse: it could start from nothing else; but it does not seem to be realized how clogging are the discussions of `humours' which, in histories of English literature, fill up the pages on Jonson. His plays have the tightness and coherence of a firmly realized purpose, active in every detail, and a commentary on Jonson's technical achievements--the weight and vigour of his verse, the intensive scrutiny that it invites--is only one way of indicating his essential qualities.

Sejanus, like the other greater plays, is the product of a unique vision; but in stressing the uniqueness one has to avoid any suggestion of the idiosyncratic. It is not merely that the matter on which the poet works is provided by the passions, lusts and impulses of the actual world, the firmly defined individual spirit which moulds that matter springs from a rich traditional wisdom; it relies, that is to say, on something outside itself, and presupposes an active relationship with a particular audience.

For Jonson's knowledge, and use, of the native literary tradition there is, I believe, evidence of the usually accepted kind. One could consider his references (explicit and otherwise) to earlier poets and prose-writers from Chaucer onwards; his avowed interest in the Vetus Comodia; the obvious `morality' influence in such plays as The Devil is an Ass and The Magnetic Lady; the popular source of the jogtrot rhythms used for Nano, Androgyno and the Vice, Iniquity. But when we are dealing with a living tradition such terms are hopelessly inadequate, and exploration can be more profitably directed ... towards Jonson's handling of his main themes, lust and the desire for wealth and their accompanying vanities.

In The Devil is an Ass the satire is more than usually direct. But the play provides more than a succession of satiric comments on the first period of intensive capitalistic activity in England; it formulates an attitude towards acquisition. The word `formulates' is used advisedly. The outlook is a particular one, is Jonson's own; but it is clear that the satire presupposes certain general attitudes in the audience, and that it builds on something that was already there.

.  .  .

In The Devil is an Ass, in Volpone and The Alchemist Jonson is drawing on the anti-acquisitive tradition inherited from the Middle Ages. But this account is too narrow; the tradition included more than a mere distrust of, or hostility towards, riches. Understanding is, perhaps, best reached by studying (with Volpone in mind) the speeches of Sir Epicure Mammon. Each of them, it seems to me, implicitly refers to a traditional conception of `the Mean'. Mammon, wooing Doll, describes their teeming pleasures:

and with these

Delicate meats set our selves high for pleasure,

And take us down again, and then renew

Our youth and strength with drinking the elixir,

And so enjoy a perpetuity

Of life and lust! And thou shalt have thy wardrobe

Richer than nature's, still to change thy self.

And vary oftener, for thy pride, than she.

The reference to `nature', which give the proper angle on `a perpetuity of life and lust', is important. The accepted standard is `natural', and although exact definition would not be easy we may notice the part played by that standard throughout Jonson's work.... Mammon's folly is that he expects Subtle to

teach dull nature

What her own forces are.

Similarly in the masque, Mercury Vindicated, the alchemists `pretend ... to commit miracles in art and treason against nature ... a matter of immortality is nothing'; they `profess to outwork the sun in virtue, and contend to the great act of generation, nay almost creation'. The obviously expected response is similar to that given to the description of Mammon's jewels whose light shall `strike out the stars'. Who wants to strike out the stars, anyway? ...

In a well-known passage in Discoveries Jonson speaks of following the ancients `as guides, not commanders': `For to all the observations of the ancients, we have our own experience; which, if we will use, and apply, we have better means to pronounce'. That this was not a mere assertion of independence (or a mere translation ... ) is shown by every page on which he seems to draw most directly on the classics. Wherever the editors suggest parallels with Horace or Catullus, Tacitus or Suetonius, the re-creation is as complete as in--to take a modern instance--Mr. Pound's Propertius, so complete as to make the hunt for `sources' irrelevant. When Fitzdottrel is gloating [in The Devil is an Ass] over the prospect of obtaining an estate on which his descendants shall keep his name alive, Meercraft, characteristically speaking `out of character', reminds him of the revolution of the times:

Fitzdottrel. `Tis true.

DROWN'D LANDS will live in drown'd land.

Meercraft. Yes, when you

Have no foot left; as that must be, sir, one day.

And though it tarry in your heirs some forty,

Fifty descents, the longer liver at last, yet,

Must thrust them out on't, if no quirk in law

Or odd vice of their own not do it first.

We see those changes daily: the fair lands

That were the client's, are the lawyer's now;

And those rich manors there of goodman Taylor's,

Had once more wood upon them, than the yard

By which they were measured out for the last purchase.

Nature hath these vicissitudes. She makes

No man a state of perpetuity, sir.

Here is the passage in Horace (Satires, II, 2) that the speech `derives' from:

nam propriae telluris erum natura neque illum

nec me nec quemquam statuit: nos expulit ille,

illum aut nequities aut vafri inscitia iuris,

postremo expellet certe vivacior heres.

Even in the lines that come nearest to translation there is a complete transmutation of idiom: `nequities' ["a bad quality" or "worthlessness"] has become `some odd vice', and `ignorance of the subtle law', the sardonically familiar quirk in law'. But as Horace is left behind the presence of everyday life is felt even more immediately, in `daily', those rich manors there' and `goodman Taylor's', followed as these are by a kind of country wit about the yardstick. The strength of the passage--it is representative--lies in the interested but critical inspection of a familiar world.

In pointing to the idiom we are of course noticing very much more than `local colour'; we are noticing ways of thought and perception. Jonson's idiom--his vocabulary, turns of phrase and general linguistic habits--might form a study in itself. It was Coleridge who spoke of `his sterling English diction'--which seems a sufficient rejoinder to the description, `ponderous Latinism', applied by a recent anthologist of the seventeenth century. It is easy, as Gifford pointed out, to exaggerate the extent of Jonson's latinized formations when we forget the similar experimenting of his contemporaries. (And it was not Jonson who tried to introduce `lubrical', `magnificate', `ventosity' and the rest.) But whereas these have had too much attention, a more striking characteristic has had none. Important as Jonson was as a formative influence on the Augustan age, his English is not `polite'; it is, very largely, the popular English of an agricultural country. It is not merely a matter of vocabulary--`ging' (gang), `threaves', `ding it open': one could go on collecting--his inventive habits are of a kind that can still be paralleled in country life. There is the delighted recognition of those elements of caricature that man or nature supplies ready made: `It is now such a time ... that every man stands under the eaves of his own hat, and sings what pleases him'. There are those derisive compounds: `Honest, plain, livery-three-pound-thrum'. There is predilection for alliterative jingles:

You shall be soaked, and stroked, and tubb'd and rubb'd,

And scrubb'd, and fubb'd, deai don.

And if this kind of clowning is thought unworthy of serious criticism we can point to the easy alliterative run of `the tip, top, and tuff of all our family'.... But even the pleasantries reveal a natural bent, and the boisterous coining of nicknames--`His great Verdugoship'--was more than a rustic habit; `old Smug of Lemnos', `Bombast of Hohenhein' (Vulcan and Paracelsus) indicate an attitude, similar to Nashe's, of familiar disrespect towards text-book worthies. And the amazing fertility that reveals itself now in a popular fluency

--our Doll, our castle, our cinque port,

Our Dover pier--

now in Volpone's mountebank oration, now in Mammon's description of luxury, is an index of a native vigour that we recognize as `typically Elizabethan'. The more we study Jonson in minute detail the more clearly he appears both intensely individual and--the paradox is justifiable--at one with his contemporaries.

The speech last quoted from The Devil is an Ass has a further significance; it represents an outlook that is present even in such pure entertainment as The Silent Woman (See Truewit on Time in I, i), and that combines easily with hilarious comedy, as in Volpone's ludicrously inadequate modesty.... Meercraft's speech, that is, forms part of the permanent sombre background of which we are made aware in all of Jonson's comedies. But the insistence on mortality has the very opposite effect of the introduction of a death's head at a feast; it is not for the sake of a gratuitous thrill.

Nature hath these vicissitudes. She makes

No man a state of perpetuity, sir.

It is the tone--the quiet recognition of the inevitable--that is important; and the clearly apprehended sense of mutability heightens, rather than detracts from, the prevailing zest.

It is here, I think, that a genuine `classical influence', or at least the influence of Horace, can be traced.

.  .  .

The aspects of experience represented by `the Iron gates' would hardly be present in a nineteenth-century `love poem', or, if present, would have a totally different intention and effect. It was in connexion with Marvell, we remember, that Mr Eliot defined Wit: `It involves a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible'. Jonson had not a metaphysic wit and he was not Donne, but it is a similar recognition, implicit or explicit, of the whole range of human life, that explains his tough equilibrium.

.  .  .

I have tried to show that, in Jonson's audience, we may postulate a lively sense of human limitations. When Mammon declared of the elixir that, taken by an old man, it will

Restore his years, renew him, like an eagle,

To the fifth age; make him get sons and daughters,

Young giants; as our philosophers have done,

The ancient patriarchs, afore the flood,

But taking, once a week, on a knife's point,

The quantity of a grain of mustard of it,

they had a right to laugh as our modern seekers after youth have not. But it was not a sense that incapacitated from living in the present. One does not need to search for illustration of Jonson's lively interest in every aspect of his environment. Meercraft's speech comes from a play which ... forms the most striking indictment of the newer forms of economic parasitism. It would be good to see The Devil is an Ass acted; it would be good to see Sejanus--which has a contemporary relevance not merely because it is a study of tyranny (`We shall be marked anon, for our not Hail'), but it would be better if one could feel assured that they were widely read. Jonson's permanent importance is beyond question, but the discipline that a thorough assimilation of his work imposes is an especial need of the present day. It is not merely that poets might profitably study his verse as well as Donne's and Hopkins', Skelton's and The Seafarer (I am not suggesting anything so foolish as direct imitation); not merely that practitioners of `the poetic drama' might learn something of effective stylization (the result of an emotional discipline) from his plays: these matters, in any case, are best left to poets. But for all of us he is one of the main channels of communication with an almost vanished tradition. That tradition cannot be apprehended in purely literary terms, but we can learn something of it through literature, just as to feel our way into the technique of Jonson's verse is to share, in some measure, that steady, penetrating scrutiny of men and affairs.

Source: L. C. Knights, "Tradition and Ben Jonson," in his Drama & Society in the Age of Jonson, Barnes and Noble, 1937, pp. 179- 99.