Notes and Queries, Dec 1997 v44 n4 p525(2)

Jonson's Every Man Out and commentators on Terence. Steggle, Matthew.

Abstract: H.L. Snuggs attributes one of Ben Jonson's passages in 'Every Man Out' to the Italian critic Minturno. At the same time, Minturno's own source, the Donatan commentary on Terence, also looms behind Jonson's work. The Donatan commentary appeared in one form or another alongside almost every Renaissance edition of the Roman dramatist. The characters of the 'grex' furnished 'Every Man Out' with a commentary in the style of Donatus.

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Cord. You say well, but I would faine heare one of these autumne-judgements define once, Quid sit Comoedia? if he cannot, let him content himselfe with CICEROS definition (till bee haue strength to propose to himselfe a better) who would haue a Comoedie to be Imitatio Vitae, Speculum consuetudinis, Imago veritatis; a thing throughout pleasant, and ridiculous, and accommodated to the correction of manners.(1)

As H. L. Snuggs pointed out, Jonson's direct source in this passage is the Italian critic Minturno.(2) All the same, looming behind it is Minturno's own source - the Donatan commentary on Terence, which appeared in one form or another alongside almost every Renaissance edition of the Roman dramatist, and which fathered onto Cicero a definition of comedy not to be found anywhere in Cicero's extant works. Jonson's interest in these editions of Terence is well known, and the printing conventions later adopted in his Folio are based at least in part upon them.(3)

Furthermore, the characters of the 'grex', even in discussing such metatheatrical matters, furnish Every Man Out with a commentary in the style of Donatus. Even their names, it is argued here, are significant in this respect.

The names of Asper, Mitis, and Cordatus have always been treated as 'Cratylic', to use the terminology of Anne Barton - expressing respectively the harshness, softness, and good-heartedness of their three ideally conceived and puppet-like owners. But Asper, Cordatus, and Mitis are also the names of writers whose work Jonson might well have known. Two of them, in fact, are commentators upon Terence.(4)

In the margins of Renaissance editions of Terence, among the various dissenting voices arguing over points of grammar and meaning, there is one referred to as 'Asper'. This is the second-century writer Aemilius Asper, whose commentaries are among those subsumed into the Donatari scholia.(5) Asper's interventions by name in the margin are relatively few; for instance, in the scholia to Adelphoe III.ii.25, IV.ii.20, and Phormio I.ii.24. All the same, he was well-known by reputation as early and authoritative. He was given a prominent place on the title-pages of the various printings of Erasmus's edition of Terence, for instance: Habes hic amice lector P. Terentii Comoedias, una cum scholiis ex Donati Asperi, et Cornuti commentariis decerptis, multo quam antehac unquam prodierunt emendatiores . . . (Basle: Froben, 1538).(6)

Another edition of Terence from the sixteenth century features a different Jonsonian namesake, the little-known French humanist Vincentius Cordatus: P. Terentii Afri Comoediae sex, infinitis fere locis emendatae: Una cure Vinc. Cordati Vesul. Burg. Commentariis in Andriam; Summariis uero (quae Argumenta uocant,) & Annotationibus methodicis Rei, ac Styli in reliquas (Venice: Aldine Press, 1570). Cordatus' commentary analyses the play into a Donatan structure of protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe, and uses the content as a quarry for moral exempla.(7) These structural and moral concerns reappear of course in the commentary of Jonson's Cordatus.

There were even writers active in the sixteenth century using the name 'Mitis', such as the Latin poet Thomas Mitis, author of several works including an Elegia de Providentia Dei (Prague, 1562): but the thematic parallel with the concerns of Every Man Out is far less impressive than with the two commentators upon Terence. At any rate, it is worth noting that whereas to a modern reader this name too seems impossibly unreal, it did not appear so at the time.

Asper and Cordatus, then, are not just idealized abstractions. By their very names they draw parallels between Jonson's work and classical comedy, and not just classical comedy, but in particular that edifice of subsequent scholarship and paratext, both ancient and modern, that transformed it into canonical literature. In the way that they act as commentators and theorists, they function very much in the mode of their namesakes the Terentian commentators, as part of Jonson's concerted programme to insist that professional drama deserves the same sort of literary attention. Indeed, Jonson's next comedy went further, and named the scholar-satirist simply 'Criticus'. But whereas Criticus, despite his name, is fully integrated into the dramatic world of the play on which he is a commentator, Asper and Cordatus offer a shadowier sort of personated gloss, working like their namesakes in the margins of Terence's legacy.

MATTHEW STEGGLE Trinity College, Oxford

1 Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of his Humour, III.vi.202-8, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-1952) (henceforth H&s). Cf. Mitis' anxiety that the play should conform to the 'Terentian manner', Induction 229-45.

2 H. L. Snuggs, 'The source of Jonson's definition of Comedy', Modern Language Notes, lxv (1950), 543-4.

3 H&S, IX, 46-7.

4 It is impossible to specify in what edition Jonson read Terence. David McPherson traces a manuscript of Terence that Jonson acquired, and an edition which it was wrongly thought that he had owned: cf. 'Jonson's Library and Marginalia: an Annotated Catalogue', Studies in Philology, lxxi (1974), 5: 94, 106.

5 See The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1979), s.v. Asper; Pauly-Wissowa, Realenzyklopadie der klassischen Altertumwissenschaft, 34 vols (Stuttgart, 1893-1972), s.v. Aemilius (29); Aeli Donati Commentum Terentii, ed. P. Wessner, 3 vols (1902-8; Stuttgart, 1966).

6 Erasmus also mentions him twice in the prefatory material: sigs. [a3.sup.r], [a6.sup.r].

7 Not much is known about Cordatus beyond the fact that he came from Vesoul; cf. Index Biographique Francaise, ed. H. Dwyer and B. Dwyer (London, 1993), I, 525, and the microfiche series Archives Biographiques Francaises, ed. S. Bradley (London, 1988), 250: 450.