Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Fall 1997 v39 i3 p284(12)

"Man to man": self-fashioning in Jonson's "To William Pembroke". Kolbrener, William.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, with its claims that there may have been "less autonomy" in the self-fashioning of the Renaissance than had once been perceived, initiated the movement of English Renaissance studies away from its uncritical and romantic celebration of the autonomous individual. (1) Indeed, Jean Howard, writing in 1986, sees as primary among the accomplishments of the New Historicists the ability to transcend the historiographical construction of the Renaissance as "set forth by Jacob Burckhardt"--that conception which saw the Renaissance as "the age of the discovery of man the individual." (2) Yet attempts to transcend the dualism that Howard attributes to Burckhardt--that between renaissance individualism and feudal obligation--nonetheless persist in the historiographical assumptions of contemporary scholars. For Greenblatt himself, the primary mode of self-fashioning occurs as the emergent bourgeois individual fashions himself in relation to the configurations of the early modern court. The individual and the social--though now understood as more reciprocally defining than in Burckhardt-are nonetheless often hypostatized as extremes of the historical process. Thus Howard cites the work of Don E. Wayne in which Ben Jonson is described as one who seemed to be "an apologist for an older feudal ideology which stressed the importance of the social collectivity over the individual." (3) Here, in Wayne's seeming perpetuation of the category of "the feudal" or the even less precise "social collectivity" (bearing a strange resemblance to Tillyard's regularly maligned "Elizabethan World Picture"), both the possibilities for autonomous selfhood and unreflective obligation to authority reemerge: the feudal is still seen as the locus of obligation (bearing the marks of subjection or "wholeness," depending upon the historiographical perspective), while the post-feudal permits the possibility--however circumscribed--of individual autonomy. If we are to further distance ourselves from this per haps unsatisfactory periodization of the Renaissance, then the binary between freedom and obligation--often surreptitiously smuggled into contemporary argument--must likewise be transcended. Ben Jonson's work--and below I will be looking closely at his "To William Earl of Pembroke"--may contain a civic or humanist impulse that challenges, or at least refuses, those binaries often prevalent among contemporary critics of the Renaissance.

Following the influential work of Stephen Orgel, a variety of contemporary critics have portrayed Jonson as simultaneously subsumed into the autocracy of a divine right monarch yet emerging into visibility as an independent entity precisely through "validating" the "authority" and "power" of the monarch. (4) Indeed, much of recent Jonson criticism retains the antithesis between individualism and tradition, and has depicted Jonson as emerging from the constraints of a feudal order into the more manageable and manipulable constraints of the Jacobean court. (5) If for Orgel the masque entailed the subordination of the "host of lesser gods" of the "classical pantheon" to the power of the king, it also entailed the subordination of all other perspectives (both political and epistemological, as Orgel's work painstakingly demonstrates) to that of the monarch. (6) Anticipating the Jamesonian analysis of genre, Orgel demonstrated--even in his early work of the sixties--the ways in which the very form of the masque ent ails its own ideological commitments. Following Orgel's line of analysis, contemporary critics have suggested that Jonson, against the grain of social roles naturalized "or legitimated by tradition," fashioned a kind of provisional autonomy through, paradoxically, celebrating the power and sovereignty of the monarch.

The role of individual autonomy, for example, remains central in Jonathan Haynes's recent account of Jonson's career. Jonson, Haynes observes,

built his career more clearly than anyone ever had on the assumption that the future lay with a new kind of artist, a figure he himself was busy constituting ... its central feature was the personal autonomy that the traditional society could not support but the emerging capitalist society did. (7)

In addition to the problems posed by Haynes's reference to "traditional society," there are significant problems posed by the narrative that he tells--a narrative corroborated by Wayne, for whom Jonson is constantly promulgating the ethos of the modern individual. The notion that Jonson was actively pursuing personal autonomy--"self-fashioning"--presupposes that, for Jonson, poetic authority was to be articulated from within the configurations of early capitalism--in the subject's private role subordinate to a courtly authority which he was now able to exploit to his advantage.

Perhaps the most compelling account of Jonson's immersion in the "psychology of patronage relations" has been Robert C. Evans's Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage. To Evans, Jonson was a writer "whose works were radically conditioned by a culture rooted in hierarchical relations." Against attempts to understand Jonson's works in "abstractly moral terms," Evans locates Jonson's works squarely within the competitive context of courtier life. Jonson, like his patrons, sought to be a more "effective competitor"; he therefore, writes Evans, cultivated a "poetic of self promotion." Examining Jonson's particular negotiations with his patrons, Evans argues that Jonson's poetics often veiled "the extent to which he necessarily served himself--the extent to which his works can be viewed in terms of personal strategy and tactics." (8) For Evans, the moral terms of Jonsonian analysis--and his humanist register--are subordinated and placed in the service of market discourses.

No doubt Evans has clarified the ways in which Jonson's successful courtier ethos prefigured early modern notions of the individual. (9) But Jonson's works at once prove and challenge the story of the ostensible emergence of Renaissance individualism implicit in the historiography of recent critics. To be sure, as Wayne argues, Jonson's works register the transition from an "idea of community founded on doctrinal tradition to one based on market conditions and market law." (10) But the emphasis in recent Jonson criticism has been so centered on corroborating a version of Burkhardt's (and now Wayne's) story that it risks allegorizing history--one of the very tendencies that the New Historicism intends to mitigate. (11) Wayne's "Alternative View" (part of the subtitle of his 1982 piece on Jonson) has become in its own way authoritative. Yet in situating individual authority and autonomy (however circumscribed) exclusively within the realms of the modem sovereign, Wayne occludes other forms of agency and author ity which were still at Jonson's disposal. Indeed, the subordination of classical discourses to royal discourses, which Orgel finds characteristic of the masque, gives way in Jonson's poetic world to a hermeneutics based upon humanist reciprocity--not the priority of the royal perspective. Indeed, in Jonson's poetic world the "classical pantheon" emerges again, challenging the privileged perspective assumed by the divine monarch in the world of the masque. Where the king's prominence and privilege was assured in the masque by an "optics" by which the king would become "the focal point" of the theatrical spectacle, Jonson's poetic world presupposed a hermeneutics by means of which authority--at least in ideal terms--would be reciprocal and collective. (12) The "individual" in this context is not so much a function of the court, but of a community.

The historical juncture at which Jonson wrote was indeed complex: if the marketplace figures prominently in Jonson's works, it is often diagnosed in explicitly Roman languages-both stoic and republican. As Malcolm Smuts argues, the fact that "Jacobean intellectuals were obsessed with corruption at court" is an indication of the way in which "Roman thought shaped English culture and political discourse of the early seventeenth century." (13) Indeed, civic discourses may have emerged, as Smuts argues, as they were reflected in the importation of stoic discourses of the late empire. The problem for the historian of discourses is complex: does Jonson's antimarket ethos emerge as a result of this importation of stoic and civic discourses, or do his civic discourses emerge in response to his perception of the excesses of the market? The complex form of the question implies the poverty of any simple response, though we can be certain that the return to the "immediate historical context" precludes dismissal of these historical discourses as mere instruments of "self-interest" and "self promotion." As Greenblatt suggests, marketplace and aesthetic discourses emerge in the seventeenth century in a reciprocal and mutually defining relationship. (14) Further, Jonson's poetic languages, like the "discourses" of which J. G. A. Pocock writes, are by their very nature not only "ambivalent," but "polyvalent." (15) Recent criticism (and the historiography implicit within it) threatens to appropriate Jonson's humanist commitments entirely within market paradigms. A sensitivity, however, to what Pocock calls the "patterns of polyvalence" in discourses might help to reveal that the Jonsonian humanist coexists strangely with the courtier Jonson.

The conception of the poet's authority as merely private and autonomous is, in fact, mitigated by other passages from the Discoveries that suggest a more public--and distinctively civic--notion of authority. The poet, writes Jonson,

must have civil prudence and eloquence, & that whole; not taken up by snatches, or pieces, in sentences, or remnants, when he will handle business, or carry councils, as if he came then out of the declaimers' gallery, or shadows, but furnished out of the body of the state, which commonly is the school of men. (6)

From this perspective the poet conceived as mere counselor and learned manipulator of social convention is insignificant, while the poet imagined by Jonson--"the nearest borderer upon the orator," expressing "all his virtues" (450)--plays a public and deliberative, not merely a private and epideictic, role. Similarly, echoing a Ciceronian tradition that condemns the separation of phronesis and theoria, Jonson proclaims:

I could never think the study of wisdom confined only to the philosopher: or of piety to the divine: or of state to the politic. But that he which can feign a commonwealth (which is the poet) can govern it with councils, correct it with Judgments, inform it with religion, and morals; is all these (405).

In embracing the public virtues of the "orator," Jonson rejects "private breeding"; those orators who come "out of the declaimers gallery or shadows" (450) are understood as they had been in a tradition that dates from Quintilian and Tacitus. "Hemmed in all around with narrow boundaries," as Tacitus writes in the Dialogus, the rhetor during the empire is limited to the "shade" of the schools where he practices declamation and engages in mock debate. (17)

The Jonson of the Discoveries who asserts that it is the "office of a wise patriot ... to take care of the commonwealth of learning" (402) likewise holds in disdain the rhetorical activity that emanated from "the declaimer's gallery" and was marginalized from meaningful public debate. Thus Jonson on the education of children: "To breed them at home, is to breed them in a shade; where in a school they have the light and heat of the sun. They are used, and accustomed to things and men" (424). The private authority achieved by the courtier Jonson (the master of manners) of recent criticism is seen at least in parts of the Discoveries as an impoverished creature: "Eloquence would be but a poor thing, if we should only converse with singulars; speak but man and man together. Therefore, I like no private breeding" (424). Jonsonian rhetoric is, like its Aristotelian and Ciceronian antecedents, distinctively public. Even his poetry of praise has a public, not merely epideictic, tone. Camden, in the Epigrams, becomes a paradigm of this public or national virtue, for it is to him, writes Jonson, "to whom my countrey owes / The great renowne, and name wherewith she goes" (34; II. 3-4). Virtue, here, as in "To Sir Robert Wroth," is public, not partisan: those who fulfill the Jonsonian ideal "think not, then, which side the cause shall leese, / Nor how to get the lawyers fees" (99; II. 61-2). "Private breeding," in the language of the late empire, leads to corruption. The presence of what we might call civic discourses in the Discoveries, in which the poet understands his own activity as presupposed by a civic liberty that entails not only autonomy, but obligation between "man and man," might inform a more nuanced reading of Jonson's poetry. (18)

Wesley Trimpi has already provided a rhetorical analysis of Jonsonian plain style; it remains to be seen how classical rhetoric and ethics might help elucidate Jonson's poetry. (19) Katherine Maus moves in this direction when she explicitly affiliates Jonson's sensibility with the orator Cicero, as well as a line of Roman thinkers whose "commitment" to both "the active life" and community was strong. Similarly, William Blisset argues that i Cataline "required [its] audience to think themselves back into republican Rome," and further, "to think republican thoughts." Jonson believed, Ann Barton writes, as did his Cicero in Cataline, "that it was impossible to excel without being, at the same time, a good and virtuous man." (20) In Cataline, therefore, Cicero's "virtue" is manifest publicly, as he confides in the last lines of the play: "Here conclude / Your praises, triumphs, honors, and rewards, / Decreed to me: only the memorie / Of this glad day, if I may know it liue / Within your thoughts, shall affect my conscience" (V, 695-9). (21) The senate in Cataline not only guarantees the efficacy of Cicero's plans but establishes their virtue in a public context. Thus Cicero's identity is publicly constituted, as the "thoughts" of the senate impose upon his "conscience." Jonson's humanism is therefore not only a political but an epistemological principle. Ciceronian rhetoric--distinctively public--constitutes reality; while Cataline's factional instincts lead only to political failure. Thus Cataline's demise is figured in his rhetorical failure (and his refusal of the public sphere), while Cicero's success is guaranteed not only through his rhetorical prowess but through the public realm (the Roman senate) that supports and confers "virtue" upon him. While Cataline distrusts the power of language--"I Neuer yet knew, Souldiers, that, in fight, / Words added vertue vnto valiant men; / Or, that a generalls oration made / An armie fall, or stand" (V, 367-70)--the efficacy of Cicero's eloquence at the climax of Cataline i s confirmed by Cato: "His eloquence hath more deserv'd to day, / Speaking thy ill, then all thy ancestors / Did, in their good: and, that the state will find, which he hath sau'd" (III, 472-5). Cataline, like an impoverished Coriolanus, distrusts the power of language, while Cato acknowledges the power of Ciceronian "eloquence." Indeed, by merely "speaking," Cato observes, Cicero achieves more than Cataline or his ancestors ever did. In Jonson's most republican of works (the "Roman republic," Barton remarks, "is the real protagonist of the play") (22) the combined eloquence of Cato and Cicero (and the "state" that only after will confirm their claims) serves as the morally constitutive source that the king (and his imputed perspective) embodied in the Jonsonian masque.

Clearly, Cataline and even Sejanus stand in a varied Jonsonian corpus--with works that presuppose far different political (as well as epistemological) assumptions. Notwithstanding this, as well as the fact that the actuality of Jonson's political situation would obviously prevent the realization of the deliberative attributes he ascribed to the Ciceronian poet/orator, I would suggest that we might with Victoria Kahn see Jonson's work as, at least in part, a meditation upon that possibility. Although the certainty of prudential action is absent (indeed often vitiated by the courtier ethos described by Evans), we may see Jonson's works as Kahn views the works of Erasmus, Hobbes, and Montaigne:

In these later texts, the authors are finally less concerned with moving the reader to action or even to a particular attitude than with forcing the reader to reflect on how praxis can be and, in some case, whether it can be. (23)

That is, Jonson may have articulated civic discourses presupposed upon a communal constitution of authority, but his actual political commitments--which manifested themselves most directly in the masques--were often determined by other factors. Nonetheless, Jonson's poetic works, I would like to suggest--turning briefly now to a local reading of his "To William, Earl of Pembroke"--embody notions of public authority and civic virtue not fully assimilable to market discourses. In the epigram, praxis, prudential action, is articulated, if only as an ideal. But even in its failure, a notion of public virtue--one that resists the categories both of "traditional" feudal hierarchy and modem individualism--makes its presence felt.

In "To William, Earl of Pembroke" the opening lines suggest that individual virtue is dependent upon and mediated through public context, that Pembroke's name is "an epigram on all mankind"--a name addressed at once "against the bad, but of, and to the good" (71; 11. 2, 3). Pembroke, the paradigm by which virtue and vice are measured, is significantly not only "of the good," but his virtue is guaranteed, and defined, by his relation "to the good." That is, his virtue and, by extension, the vice of others is inscribed within an already existing hermeneutic circle--what Gadamer, in a Vician mode, calls the "sensus communis." (24) The authority of Pembroke's name is dependent upon a community in which the distinction between virtue and vice is already presupposed, always already recognized. Indeed, this is how Seneca understood the perception of vice and virtue in one of the antecedents to Jonson's poem, "De Tranquillate Animi." Both "classes of men," writes Seneca, the "worthy" as well as the "contrivers of the most monstrous crimes," "were necessary in order that Cato might be understood--he needed good men that he might win their approval, and bad men that he might prove his strength." (25) Jonsonian, like Senecan virtue, is already presupposed upon the existence of a public realm in which these categories can be recognized. Thus Jonson also proclaims in his "The Mind of the Frontispiece to a Booke," "But both might know their wayes were understood; / When vice alike in time with vertue dur'd" (161; 11. 7-8). Against the hermeneutics of the Jonsonian masque, where the singular perspective of the king is finally authoritative, in the epigram Pembroke requires community in order for his virtue to be affirmed.

The image of Pembroke's life, however, ostensibly embodying in its particularity the measure of the virtue and vice of "all mankind," fails in the epigram to meet with immediate recognition--both the "bad" and the "good" need to be "asked" by the poet "to have" Pembroke "understood" (1. 4; emphasis added). The Earl's stature must be guaranteed by public recognition, though doubt about the actuality of such acknowledgment is implied even as the poet asserts the contrary--"Nor could the age have missed thee" (1. 5). Evidence that Pembroke may in fact have been "missed" in "this strife / Of vice, and virtue" (11. 5, 6) is implied in the poet's observation that "all great life / Almost is exercised," (11. 6, 7) where Pembroke's "great life" seems the obvious target for Jonson's intrusive "Almost." Though announced in the opening couplets as dependent upon--in conversation with--"all mankind," now the reserved Pembroke is figured in his autonomous isolation: "one stature still" (1. 13). Reluctant to abandon his " one true posture" (1. 14), the stoic-seeming Pembroke appears disinclined to have his life "exercised" in public view. But here, significantly, even the implicit failure of a civic context leads not to the elaboration of a modern concept of individual "self-fashioning" but to the paradoxical incarnation of the public sphere in Pembroke's "one stature still." The republican ideal retreats into the stoic, centered self.

Where the opening lines proclaim the synecdochic relation between "Pembroke" and "all mankind," the poet later suggests that the relation between part and whole no longer maintains; the hermeneutic circle--evidence of a humanist epistemology, if not a republican politics--is broken. Thus Pembroke's stature, which first found its validity through a community presumed to exist, must now find its justification elsewhere. Although Jonson appears to locate such justification within Pembroke's "one stature still," he also seems discomfited by the prospect that virtue's only authority will lie in its own self-assertion and thereby have little influence in the sphere of "strife." Thus, just as Jonson would invite Cato into his "theatre" ("Dedication," 34), he also invites Pembroke from his private retirement to establish both a standard of and an inducement to public virtue. Pembroke's solitary stillness, therefore, is disrupted, as Jonson proclaims the one dynamic gesture of the poem--"thy coming in" (1. 17). The r amifications of that gesture are immediately felt as Pembroke's mere presence, "but in the view, doth interrupt their sin" (1. 18). Yet the effect of Pembroke's appearance--perhaps "missed" once before-seems idealized, for Jonson immediately enjoins his patron: "Thou must draw more" (1. 19). The comparative "more" points out the urgency of Jonson's injunction and suggests further that Pembroke's previous efforts have been inadequate. The comparative also suggests that "draw"--understandable perhaps as exerting an influence through moral sympathy--is to be understood instead as causing movement by application of force. The ideal situation in which Pembroke's name is always already "understood" (by those in whom Pembroke's virtue is both recognized and reflected) gives way to the mere "hope" that Pembroke will be the object of "study" (1. 20). The mere fact that the poet names him is not enough to assure that he will "draw" acknowledgment: Pembroke, Jonson seems to suggest, must take a more active role and exercise his "great life." (26) Versions of the Jonsonian injunction, "strive to be understood," are repeated throughout Jonson's work. It is at once the individual's most private and public gesture: the pursuit of a grounds for public virtue. (27) For notwithstandi ng Stanley Fish's claim that "it is only in private retreat that the Jonsonian self truly lives," in this poem stoic retreat is figured as a failure--symptomatic of a society in which the public grounds for virtue cease to manifest themselves. (28)

Indeed, finally, even such activity--Pembroke's brief movement--is qualified, for Jonson seems to suggest that Pembroke's virtue cannot be publicly expressed and that the civic ideal has collapsed. Therefore, the ideal public domain by and through which Pembroke's name ("of, and to the good") was initially acknowledged and authorized is now interiorized in Pembroke himself in whom some might "see / The commonwealth still safe" (1. 20). The commonwealth, that most public place--the potential locus of a civic virtue enabled through the active life--is now "still and safe," internalized in Pembroke in whom, paradoxically, public virtue is privately constituted. Yet the terms set out in Jonson's epigram at least partially frustrate the substitution by which Pembroke's name can stand in for the "commonwealth." The virtue of which Jonson writes must be defined and realized reciprocally; Pembroke, like the Jonsonian poet, requires a virtuous community in which his name can be proclaimed. In this context, Pembroke's stoic withdrawal and passivity seem impoverished--finally unrecognized by even those "rare friends" (of which he writes elsewhere) by which virtue gains currency and authority. But Jonson's representation of the failure of a civic and public discourse here is not necessarily evidence of a new mode of modern subjectivity. Rather than view Jonson's various humanist languages as merely residual to a mind governed primarily by market instincts (as in recent criticism), we might see these languages as providing Jonson a means to combat--however ineffectively--those encroaching market forces that were setting virtue "at a price."

The language of Jonson's epigram, as the language of "fair acceptance" of "Inviting a Friend to Supper" and the language of reciprocity implied in the poet's response to the aspirant member of the tribe of Ben, implies a humanist language of reciprocity that sits uneasily with the hierarchized epistemology of the early modern masque, as well as the courtier and marketplace ideology said to inform it. This persistence of a distinctively humanist register in Jonson's poems qualifies the simple narrative of the progress of feudal obligation to bourgeois individualism that continues to appear in Renaissance literary studies--and especially in the image of the courtier Jonson. To elaborate the tension between republican and stoic discourses in Jonson's work, and their reaction and interaction with the discourses of the market, is to chart a path that leads through the seventeenth century, a path that leads us to another strangely configured "individual"--that is, to Milton.

Bar-Ilan University

Jerusalem, Israel

NOTES

(1.) Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.

(2.) Jean Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 15.

(3.) Howard, "New Historicism," 25.

(4.) Stephen Orgel, "The Royal Theatre and the Role of the King," in Patronage in the Renaissance, eds. Guy Fitch and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 261.

(5.) The historiographical narrative by which the individual emerges from the feudal darkness is often accepted unreflectively by literary scholars. Historians such as J. G. A. Pocock have acknowledged the rhetoricity and contingency of this historiographical construct. The prevalence of the construct, Pocock explains ("The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism," Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar [Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980]), emerges from the phenomenon that "classical and socialist critics converge--and nearly unite--in perpetuating a distortion of history which consists in vastly exaggerating the role of liberalism (or of possessive individualism or of bourgeois ideology)" (17). The insistence on the bifurcation between feudalism and an emergent individualism is a species of what Pocock calls, following Herbert Butterfield, "Whig history" (see Pocock's Virtue, Commerce and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 51-71).

(6.) Orgel, "Royal," 261.

(7.) Jonathan Haynes, "Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair," English Literary History 51 (1984): 662.

(8.) Robert C. Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1989). 107, 38, 37.

(9.) On the historiography of the individual in Milton studies, see my "'Plainly Partial': The Liberal Areopagitica," English Literary History 60 (1993): 57-78.

(10.) Don E. Wayne, "Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternative View," Renaissance Drama 13 (1982): 118.

(11.) See, for example, Greenblatt's "Resonance and Wonder," in Learning to Curse (New York: Routledge, 1990), 164-70.

(12.) Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 14.

(13.) Malcolm Smuts, "Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linday Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 108-9.

(14.) See "Towards a Poetics of Culture," Learning To Curse, 146-60.

(15.) Pocock, Virtue, 8-9.

(16.) Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New Haven: Yale University Press), 449-50. All quotations from Jonson's prose and nondramatic poetry are cited from this edition.

(17.) See Tacitus, Dialogus, eds. E. Capps et. al. (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920), 95. By contrast, in Cicero's De Oratore, the orator is led "out of this sheltered training ground at home, right into action, into the dust and uproar, into the camp and the fighting-line of public debate." Similarly, Seneca proclaims in his Controversies: "Lead your declaimers into the Senate or the Forum and you will see them change. In the same way as bodies habituated to close chambers and soft shadows, they are not able to sustain the open air; they can bear neither the rain nor the sun" (cited in Wesley Trimpi, "The Meaning of Horace's 'Ut Pictura Poesis,'" JWCI 36 [1973]: 9). For an extended discussion of the styles of public debate, see Trimpi, "Meaning," passim, esp. 8-11.

(18.) For the most extensive treatment of the emergence of classical republicanism in the seventeenth century, see the works of J. G. A. Pocock, especially his Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Here Pocock argues explicitly against the Macphersonian paradigm of possessive individualism: "We have found that a bourgeois ideology," a paradigm for capitalist man as zoon politikon, was immensely hampered in its development by the omnipresence of Aristotelian and civic humanist values...." (460-1).

(19.) Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). For Jonson, eloquence is not merely a rhetorical but a cosmological principle: "the order of God's creatures in themselves, is not only admirable, and glorious, but eloquent" (438).

(20.) Katherine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984), 5; William Blisset, "Roman Ben Jonson," in Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio (Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 102; Ann Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 160.

(21.) Ben Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), all citations from Cataline--with act and line numbers--are from this edition.

(22.) Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, 160.

(23.) Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 54.

(24.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1991), 20.

(25.) Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 239.

(26.) Jonson's poetic injunction may have had its roots in Pembroke's personality. Thus the Dictionary of National Biography: "There [was] a want of spirit laid to his charge ... that he [was] a melancholy young man." Further, "he never acted with much strength of will," and "as a statesman," he lacked force of character. Bacon claimed that "he was not effectual," while Gardiner dubbed him the "Hamlet of Charles' court" (DNB, 678, 680-1).

(27.) In "To the Reader," Jonson intones, "Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my book in hand, / To reade it well: that is to understand" (35, 1-2). While in The Alchemist, Jonson hopes for an "understander," in Bartholomew Fair, (ed. Maurice Hussey [London: Emest Benn, 1964]), the genuine reciprocity implied in "understanding" seems truly overwhelmed by market forces as the Imprimis seeks a "covenant" for "grounded judgements and understandings" (9).

(28.) Stanley Fish, "Author Readers: Jonson's Community of the Same," Representations 7 (1984): 55.