Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age

  Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age

  This page intentionally left blank Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age

TOM LOCKWOOD

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

  

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

  

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

  

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries

  

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

_

T. E. Lockwood, 2005

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  

First published 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction

outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,

Oxford University Press, at the address above

  

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

  

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available

Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain

on acid-free paper by

Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

  

ISBN 0-19-928078-9 978-0-19-928078-0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  

For my parents

and for Beck

  

Acknowledgements

  This book developed out of a suggestion made by Ian Donaldson; in the Ph.D. thesis he then supervised at Cambridge and subsequently my indebtedness to him has been as great as such a thing ever should be. My examiners, Jonathan Bate and Simon Jarvis, helped me to see how that thesis might become a book; both at earlier and later stages, my teachers at Girton College, Juliet Dusinberre, Anne Fernihough, and James Simpson, read parts of my work and showed me how it might be undertaken. As Jonson writes finely in Discoveries: ‘I thanke those, that have taught me, and will ever.’

  At Leeds, David Fairer, Robert Jones, and John Whale have all com- mented on at least one chapter; I am grateful for conversations with Michael Brennan, Martin Butler, and David Lindley; and Paul Ham- mond, besides other kindnesses, helped me to think through the shape and purpose of the book. The comments of David Bevington and my two other (anonymous) readers at Oxford University Press have enabled me to improve my final text; Sophie Goldsworthy and Andrew McNeillie have encouraged me through the process of that improvement. Jacqueline Baker, Tom Perridge, and Jean van Altena have expertly guided the book into print. Any errors that have survived are mine.

  I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Hu- manities Research Board, who funded my doctoral work, and latterly the British Academy, whose award of a Postdoctoral Fellowship has allowed me to complete work on the book. I am grateful also to the Beinecke Lib- rary, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, for the award of visiting fellowships that enabled me to work with their collections; the School of English at the University of Leeds has also supported my research.

  For permission to quote from manuscript and printed material in their care I am grateful to the following institutions and individuals: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the British Library, London; Cambridge University Lib- rary; Special Collections, University of Delaware Library; Edinburgh

  Acknowledgements vii

  Marino, California; the John Murray Archive, London, and Mrs Virginia Murray (Archivist); the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library; the Leeds Library; the National Art Library, London; the National Lib- rary of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Theatre Museum, London; the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, for the Earl and Countess of Harewood and Trustees of the Harewood House Trust; and York Minster Library.

  It is a pleasure to thank severally the staff of these and other libraries for the courtesy extended to me during the course of my research.

  An earlier version of material presented in Chapters 2 and 6 was pub- lished in The Library; I am grateful to the Council of the Bibliographical Society and the journal’s editor, Oliver Pickering, for permission to use this material.

  Without the support of my parents, Chris and Roy, my sister, Rosie, and my brother, Joe, this research would not have been possible; without Beck, though, it would have been miserable; and Daniel has provided a very strong incentive to bring it now to a close.

  Tom Lockwood

  Leeds, September 2004

  This page intentionally left blank

  

Contents

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

1756 The Works of Ben. Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley, 7 vols. (London:

  D. Midwinter et al., 1756)

  1811 The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley and

  Alexander Chalmers (London: John Stockdale, 1811)

  1816

The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. William Gifford, 9 vols.

  (London: G. and W. Nicol et al., 1816) BL British Library

  Disc. Discoveries DNB Dictionary of National Biography

  F Folio H&S Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson,

  11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52); u/v and i/j regularized in all quotations

  JMA John Murray Archive, 50 Albermarle Street, London, W1X

  4 BD NAL National Art Library NLS National Library of Scotland

  OED Oxford English Dictionary

  Q Quarto

  Und. The Underwood UV Ungathered Verse

  WYAS West Yorkshire Archives Service, Leeds Quotations from Jonson’s texts vary their source chapter by chapter, as indicated, in order to give a better sense of Jonson’s changing shapes through the years of my study; if quotation is from an earlier edition, an additional reference to H&S is supplied.

  All quotations from Shakespeare follow the text of The Complete

  

Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

  1988 ), unless a particular reading is under discussion, when reference is given according to the Through Line Numbering (TLN) established by

  Abbreviations and A Note on Texts xi

  With a single exception, discussed below, transcriptions from manu- script sources and from manuscript annotations to printed books are given literatim, and employ the following conventions: [-deletion] A reading deleted in the manuscript \ interlineation/ A reading interlined in the manuscript [supplied], sup[plied] Words or letters supplied due to paper loss in _{. . .} the manuscript [ ] Material omitted in transcription

  The single exception to this practice is that quotations from printed sources for the manuscripts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge follow the conventions established by his editors.

  This page intentionally left blank

  

  ‘Ben Jonson is surely an exception.’ The assertion is John Thelwall’s, one of many written in the margins of his heavily annotated copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in the years following

  1

  its publication in 1817. It is a comment made within a very specific set of contexts, by no means all of them Jonsonian: contexts that are social, political, and personal, as well as historical and bibliographical. As the annotation needs to be understood in a given time and a given location, the moment of its inscription in the margins of Thelwall’s copy of the Biographia, it needs also to be located within the contexts of Thelwall’s difficult, changed relations with Coleridge over some

  2

  twenty years. But Thelwall’s contention, ‘Ben Jonson is surely an exception’, has broader and still largely unexamined force. By locating Jonson in the margin of the Biographia, one of the central texts of the Romantic age but one from which he is otherwise excluded, the marginal interjection is emblematic of a larger truth: that for too long, Jonson has been thought different from his contemporaries and successors in having no influence upon the literary culture of the Romantic age. His presence, when allowed at all, is assumed apparently to be precisely exceptional.

  Is a Romantic Jonson merely, as here literally, a marginal Jonson? Where Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere, part of the very constitution of Romantic life (and its political and social texts), Jonson has been

  3

  thought absent; where Donne, his exact contemporary, was recovered by Romantic readers, Lamb and Coleridge among them, Jonson has ₁ Burton R. Pollin and Redmond Burke, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970), 73–94.

₂ Nicholas Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: The Road to Nether Stowey’, in Richard

Gravil and Molly Lefebure, eds., The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas Macfarland

  

(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 60–80; Thelwall as an annotator is further discussed in

David Fairer, ‘ ‘‘A little sparring about Poetry’’: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–8’, The

Coleridge Bulletin, ns 21 (2003), 20–33. ₃ The sentiment is that of Austen’s complacent Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park,

  

Introduction

  4

  been thought to languish abandoned. Spenser and Milton, to take a different pair of poets, have also been felt to be at the established centre

  5

  of Romantic writing’s relations to its literary past. Not only is Jonson unlike his contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (so we have been told), but he differs from them further in remaining bounded by his times into the past, not part of the ongoing process whereby later writers fashion their own voices from and against those of their predecessors. Anne Barton’s tightly localized account of ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in 1802’ is itself exceptional in allowing that Jonson was available to Romantic writers as a precursor from whom to learn and

  6

  depart. This study moves on from Barton’s article to argue that Jonson’s impact in the Romantic age stands in need of reconsideration: I seek to show that Jonson, far from being ignored, was widely and variously performed, read, edited, and rewritten in the Romantic age; and that, far from keeping Jonson to one side of our accounts of that age, we should allow that his apparent marginalization obscures a variety of mode, location, and response that, once recovered, refocuses our understanding both of Jonson and of those who later engaged with him. Jonson is a point across which dramatic, critical, editorial, and literary energies pass in this period; those energies are often politically inflected; and Jonson himself is refigured in their passing.

  Coleridge wrote in the Biographia that ‘the Ancients’ and ‘the elder dramatists of England and France’ did not seek merely ‘to make us laugh’ in comedy, ‘much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their characters’. This, the remark that prompted Thelwall to inscribe ₄ Compare John T. Shawcross, ‘Opulence and Iron Pokers: Coleridge and Donne’,

  

John Donne Journal, 4 (1985), 201–24; and Anthony John Harding, ‘ ‘‘Against the stream

upwards’’: Coleridge’s Recovery of John Donne’, in Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding,

eds., Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994 ₅ ), 204–20.

  On Spenser, compare Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (Uni-

versity Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), and Jack Lynch, The Age of

Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122–42;

on Milton, a much wider field, compare J. A. Wittreich, jun., The Romantics on Milton:

Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970),

and Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1993). ₆ Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in

  

Introduction

  Jonson’s exceptionality in the margins of his copy, had first been printed (by sheer oversight) once already earlier in the Biographia, and before

  7

  that eight years previously in the pages of The Friend. But Coleridge’s repeated statement and Thelwall’s awkward annotation are themselves located in a longer pattern of responses to Jonson. In the Epilogue to the second part of The Conquest of Granada, acted in 1671 and printed a year later, John Dryden recalled an earlier, pre-Restoration standard of theatrical achievement:

  

They who have best succeeded on the stage

Have still conformed their genius to their age.

Thus Jonson did mechanic humour show,

When men were dull, and conversation low.

When comedy was faultless, but ’twas coarse:

₈ Cob’s tankard was a jest, and Otter’s horse.

  Cob, the waterbearer of Jonson’s Every Man In his Humour, and Tom Otter, the wife-pecked admirer of drinking vessels from Epicœne, here stand as exemplars of Jonson’s faultless but coarse achievements; but as they demonstrate the conformity of Jonson’s ‘genius’ to his age, so they also serve to confine him to it. The ‘mechanic humour’ of Cob and Otter is a matter not only of occupation but of dramatic form; so too do they stand emblematically for the social worlds presented in Jonson’s comedies: the emergent and increasingly crowded London of the revised Every Man In and Epicœne. Dryden had three years earlier given the weighted adjective mechanic to Neander in An Essay of Dramatic

  

Poesy whereby to describe Jonson’s dramatic writings: ‘Humour was his

  proper Sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent Mechanick

  9

  people.’ To take the measure of Neander’s usage, think, contrastively, of the city and its inhabitants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the ‘crew of patches, rude mechanicals | That work for bread upon Athenian stalls’ (iii. ii. 9–10). Unlike the Shakespearean example, which describes and locates only a group of characters, Dryden’s mechanic slides between describing a character’s employment within the play world and ₇ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate,

  2

vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), ii. 186 and 46; idem, The Friend, ed. Barbara

E. Rooke, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), ii. 217 (7 Dec. 1809).

  ₈ John Dryden, ‘Epilogue to the Second Part’, ll. 1–6, from The Conquest of Granada,

in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 4 vols. (Har-

low: Longman, 1995– ), i. 243. ₉ John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in The Works of John Dryden, ed.

  

Introduction

  describing the dramatist’s construction of that play world on the stage; the adjective oscillates between qualifying the society staged by the drama and the construction of the characters and the drama itself. Jonson’s ‘mechanic humour’ and ‘mechanic people’ are conformably suited: a local observation becomes, by analogy, a measure by which to disparage

10 Jonson’s larger achievement. The connection made by Thelwall in 1817

  in the margins of Coleridge’s Biographia therefore reunites Dryden’s adjective with its subject; and when, as I discuss in Chapter 5, William Hazlitt in the following year takes up mechanical to engage with Jonson and his editor, William Gifford, we see merely the continuation of a longer pattern of attention. Repetitions of this kind, not merely fortuitous, signal instead the connections between Romantic responses to Jonson and those of the periods that preceded them. My study emphasizes, that is, not a break or fissure between earlier and Romantic Jonsons but the continuities between them and his re-creations in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.

  Moreover, such a pattern, itself not previously recognized, has also its own ironic Jonsonian beginnings. In ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, written in 1631 in the fall-out occasioned by the printed text of

  

Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, Jonson had banished his one-time

  collaborator from the exalted confines of the court masque to the less

  t

  exclusive world of the public theatre: ‘Pack w h your pedling Poetry to the

  e

  11 Stage, | This is y money-gett, Mechanick Age!’ Jones, as Jonson attacks

  him, is emblematic of everything from which he dissociates himself: not a poet but a peddler of texts as small goods, drawing them, like Shakespeare’s Autolycus or the ‘Mountebank’ of Jonson’s own poem, from his pack to hawk around; a participant not in the elegant economies of the court masque but in those, less genteel, of the stage and the public theatre. That Jonson himself would write only one further masque,

  

Chloridia, for the court in London, before himself returning to the public

  stage with The Magnetic Lady in 1632 only emphasizes the characteristic reverse that attends on the mechanical Jonson: that from which he sought to keep himself separate and by which he sought to distinguish his own writing from that of his contemporaries returns to limit and to mock his own ambitions. Mechanic, on one reading, serves narrowly to measure his achievement in later years. ₁₀ A habit that Ian Donaldson has observed elsewhere: ‘Damned by Analogies; or, How to Get Rid of Ben Jonson’, Gambit, 6 (1972), 38–46.

  

Introduction

  But on one reading only—and most likely not Jonson’s. In his commonplace book, Discoveries, Jonson showed a faith that the verdicts of posterity would rectify those contemporary judgements that undervalued a writer’s work:

  

In the meane time perhaps hee is call’d barren, dull, leane, a poore Writer (or by

what contumelious word can come in their cheeks) by these men, who without

labour, judgement, knowledge, or almost sense, are received, or preferr’d before

him. He gratulates them, and their fortune. An other Age, or juster men, will

₁₂

acknowledge the vertues of his studies.

  Jonson’s faith itself has classical sanction: as it offers solace to other, fu- ture poets, so does the passage in Discoveries recall and thus congratulate

  13

  two passages from Quintilian. An ‘other age’ and a ‘juster man’ have here indeed found in Quintilian precisely ‘vertues’ worth repeating and preserving; they anticipate a like-minded future return to Jonson. This faith in posterity—his own and others’—has appeared typically Jonso- nian and, less expectedly, by anticipation Romantic: Ian Donaldson and Andrew Bennett have both recently explored Jonson’s afterlife and his im-

  14

  pact on the afterlives of other writers. Accounts agree, however, on the ironies of Jonson’s faith: too often, unlike the writer imagined in Discov-

  

eries, he found himself praised during his lifetime but increasingly less so

  thereafter. By 1759, in the emblematic account offered by Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition, Jonson’s classicism obscures not only his tragedies but his whole career; he is not covered in classical glory, but entirely covered by it: ‘Blind to the nature of Tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it; we see nothing

  15

  of Johnson, nor indeed, of his admired (but also murdered) antients.’ As understanding of Jonson, in the capacious, admiring sense envis- aged in Discoveries, in fact appears to diminish as time passes, so, yet more cruelly, does critical attention to that history of his incorpora- tion and rejection by later writers. The Jonson Allusion-Book edited by _{12 13} Disc., 781–7: H&S viii. 587.

  Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ii. xii. 11, 12 and ii. v. 8–10: Loeb Classical Library, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). ₁₄ Ian Donaldson, ‘ ‘‘Not of an Age’’: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Verdicts of Pos-

terity’, in his Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1997 ), 180–97; Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28–9; and, taking a different point of comparison, Ian

Donaldson, ‘Perishing and Surviving: The Poetry of Donne and Jonson’, Essays in Criticism,

  51 ₁₅ (2001), 68–85.

  Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in D. H. Craig, ed., Ben Jonson: The

  

Introduction

  J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams (published in 1922) covers only the period 1597 to 1700, while Robert Gayle Noyes’s account of Ben Jonson on the

  16 English Stage (1935) closes its coverage at 1776. Whatever may be its other

  failings, G. E. Bentley’s Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the

  

Seventeenth Century Compared (1945) did not pursue the late eighteenth-

  17

  century record that Noyes had broached; and though Herford and the Simpsons’ account of Jonson’s ‘Literary Record’ assays a broader span, at its close it moves, with a rapidity that does not elsewhere characterize their meticulous work, from Pope (1728) to Swinburne (1882) in a mere

  18

  five pages. More recently, although Ejner J. Jensen’s Ben Jonson’s Com-

  

edies on the Modern Stage (1985) offered a valuable if partial discussion

  19

  of Jonson’s nineteenth-century reception,

  D. H. Craig’s otherwise ad- mirable Critical Heritage volume does not advance beyond 1798, a date whose significance I discuss in Chapter 4 below.

  But why should it matter that our existing accounts are so partial? In

  

The Classic, Frank Kermode described, with a fine phrase, ‘the temporal

  agencies of survival’, the most important of those agencies being, he suggested, ‘a more or less continuous chorus of voices asserting the value

  20

  of the classic’. Jonson has had his choristers, certainly—Byron called him ‘a Scholar & a Classic’—and at more than one dinner party in his old age (if James Howell’s report to Thomas Hawkins is to be believed) seemed

  21 all too keen, in singing his own praises, to anticipate the later harmonies.

  But the chorus asserting Jonson’s value has been discontinuous: he was not consistently, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Romantic classic. Rather, his situation more closely resembles that of Donne, discussed by Kermode in Forms of Attention, as an example of ₁₆ J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams, The Jonson Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions

  

to Ben Jonson from 1597–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922); Robert Gayle

Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1600–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1935). ₁₇ G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century

  

Compared, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); Bentley’s methodology

and conclusions were challenged by D. L. Frost, ‘Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century’,

Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 81–9; further reviews of, and additions to, Bentley’s work

are listed by Craig, ed., Critical Heritage, 579. _{18 19} H&S xi. 305–569.

  Ejner J. Jensen, Ben Jonson’s Comedies on the Modern Stage (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 7–25. _{20 21} Frank Kermode, The Classic (London: Faber, 1975), 117.

  Byron to John Murray, 4 Jan. 1821: Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand,

  

Introduction

  22

  a writer who has been lost from and then recovered to the canon. It is this doubtful space between the classic and the canonical, so usefully delineated by Kermode, that Jonson occupies in the period I consider, and which I seek here to explore for the first time. It is a period during which the distance between Jonson’s own self-conception and later responses to him play against one another. Scholars have been increasingly less willing to attribute to Jonson the clenched singleness of purpose in life, text, and career that earlier generations emphasized; rather, they have sought to emphasize his regular non-uniformity, the variety, mobility, and change within his career. If this is a contemporary Jonson, in Martin Butler’s phrase ‘genuinely inconsistent in his habits’, the many Romantic Jonsons—varied, contested, mobile—help us further to appreciate the diversity within his work and the diversity within the cultures that

  23 responded to him.

  Jonson in the Romantic age is a writer consistent in his inconsistency: responses to him cover the full range of his writings in drama, in poetry, in the masque, and in prose; they do so in ways that, rather than obscure the differences within and between his texts, alert readers to them. From Romantic margins, aspects of Jonson look different; so too, from Jonsonian margins, do aspects of the writing of the Romantic age. With such a changing account of Jonson and Jonson’s presence in mind, I use the terms ‘Jonson’ and ‘Romantic’ with a sense always that they are under taxonomic pressure: I use them as ways to produce knowledge, not with a settled conviction that they already describe a secure, pre-existing state of knowledge. As Jonson is reshaped by the responses of the period, so too is our sense of a ‘Romantic’ Jonson under pressure from others that exist alongside him: a Georgian Jonson, stressing a continuity of response across the period, or a Regency Jonson, allying him with a particular social and political context. Although the consideration of that difficult, retrospective phenomenon, Romanticism, is proper to the study of a particular set of aesthetic, cultural, and political formations, it is not

  24

  directly my aim here; rather, I aim to juxtapose many different Jonsons, ₂₂ Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),

  70 ₂₃ –2.

  Martin Butler, ‘The Riddle of Jonson’s Chronology Revisited’, The Library, 7th ser., 4

(2003), 49–63; compare also David L. Gants, ‘The Printing, Proofing and Press-Correction

of Ben Jonson’s Folio Workes’, in Martin Butler, ed., Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History,

Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 39–58. ₂₄ See Seamus Perry, ‘Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept’, in Duncan Wu,

  

Introduction

  between the years 1776 and 1850, to study the points of fit between these varying accounts of him and his writing, and to see how the many varied constructions of ‘Jonson’ engage and interact. Accordingly, I employ the adjective ‘Romantic’ pragmatically, and with a consciousness of its provisionality, in the hope that it can serve, as organizing concepts ought, to facilitate our discovery of the more detailed picture to which it must always be false: if it can never itself be fixed, we can use it as a means whereby to work towards an understanding of other, more

  25

  local, historical effects of writing. Many of the figures discussed in the later chapters gain entry into accounts of the Romantic only as they are excluded from it, either chronologically or politically: those Georgian writers of the late eighteenth century, like F. G. Waldron, who live on through the first decades of the nineteenth; or the circle of Tory, Regency Jonsonians gathered around William Gifford, editor of The Quarterly

  

Review. My purpose in examining their relations with Jonson in the years

  between 1776 and 1850 is not to claim them, for the first time, as having been as ‘Romantic’ as (say) Coleridge all along; rather, it is to bring their examples, and Jonson’s, up against an understanding of a historical period, and the currents of writing, thought, and politics at work within it, that can give us a new purchase on both the Romantic age and Jonson’s place within it.

  In the following pages I offer detailed historicized readings in Jon- son’s reception, readings that are attentive not only to his texts, but equally to his performers, readers, and editors; as I attend to their di- verse roles in the continued construction of his works, so do I also seek to explore the conditions under which they encountered him. In this account of Jonson’s reception I employ, and seek to benefit from, the contextual understandings of literary production developed in

  26

  27

  the still fresh work of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome J. McGann. Both McKenzie and McGann advocate a socialized concept of authorship ₂₅ In this I follow Iain McCalman’s lead in his ‘Introduction’ to An Oxford Companion

  

to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),

  1 –11. ₂₆ See particularly D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William

Congreve’, in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds., The Book and the Book Trade in

Eighteenth-Century Europe (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), 81–125; idem, Bibliography and the

Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and the essays collected

in idem, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald

and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). ₂₇ See esp. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: Uni-

  

Introduction

  and textual authority, whereby the material conditions of a work’s pro- duction and reception—not only its purely bibliographical codes, but the material, social, economic, and ideological networks within which it comes into being—are used to illuminate its meaning within its

  

28

  originary and subsequent horizons. Jonson, I argue, was located and constructed within networks of attention and affiliation in the years after 1776 that our current accounts do not adequately recognize. These net- works are both the product and the evidence of shared, sociable modes of performance, reading, and printing: properly to understand Jonson’s reception we must read not only the works in which he was received but understand their points of fit with the contexts—institutional, political, and intellectual—in which they were located. To do so is to take up the invitation to reconsider from a fresh historical viewpoint both Jonson and the concept of Romantic sociability articulated by Gillian Russell

  29 and Clara Tuite.

  

Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age is a two-part exploration. Part I of

  my study explores three linked contexts for Jonson’s reception in the Romantic age: his place in the theatre, in criticism, and as he was edited.

  Part II explores allusive, imaginative responses to Jonson. In both parts I introduce the concerns at issue by analysing in detail the same work, Francis Godolphin Waldron’s edition and continuation of Jonson’s The

Sad Shepherd (1783), under the complementary aspects that unite my

account. The first of these discussions of Waldron and The Sad Shepherd in Chapter 1 takes his work as a point of entry into the three linked chapters of Part I: ‘Theatrical Jonson’, ‘Critical Jonson’, and ‘Editorial Jonson’. As I argue in greater detail in Chapter 2, Jonson maintained a presence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century theatre far livelier and more various than has previously been recognized. In my discussion of ‘Theatrical Jonson’ I offer a new account of his place on the English stage, drawing out not only a new history of productions of his plays but also his importance as a figure of theatrical legitimacy in the period. The chapter takes the measure both of a perceived Romantic antitheatricality (and its Jonsonian affinities) and, at the same time, the

  

Historical Method and Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and idem, The Textual

Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). ₂₈ The differences between McKenzie and McGann, downplayed here, are trenchantly

discussed by G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology’, Studies in

Bibliography, 44 (1991), 83–143. ₂₉ Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary

  

Introduction

  real but little recognized place of Jonson on the Romantic stage. In doing so I seek to question the relationship proposed by N. W. Bawcutt between ‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic Drama’, a relation that sees the two in hostility to one another as he argues that a critical engagement with the texts replaced a theatrical engagement with them; I seek also to supplement Donald J. Rulfs’s valuable but partial

  30

  account of early modern plays on the Romantic stage. In Chapter 3, ‘Critical Jonson’, I chart responses to Jonson from Warton’s History and Johnson’s Lives through until 1840. As well as (again) arguing that Jonson was much more frequently engaged with than we have previously realized, I seek to demonstrate that such responses are involved much more in an ongoing debate with one another; at the same time, I seek to emphasize the radical new departure marked in 1808 by Octavius Gilchrist in his

  

An Examination of the Charges Maintained by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers

and Others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity & c. Towards Shakspeare and Charles

  Lamb in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the

  

Time of Shakspeare. Chapter 4, ‘Editorial Jonson’, concerns the making

  and reception of William Gifford’s nine-volume, 1816 edition of Jonson’s

  

Works. I offer a detailed historicized account of how Gifford’s edition

  came into being within its political and social context, drawing on his unpublished correspondence with Gilchrist, Scott, Canning, and others: by relating the edition’s concern with Jonsonian friendship to Gifford’s own friendships, I seek to situate its presentation of Jonson within a historically rich framework. Later in the chapter I discuss William Hazlitt’s responses to Jonson and his editor through Jonson’s tragedy

  

Sejanus: I argue that Hazlitt, far from endorsing the claims for Jonsonian

  friendship made by the edition, reads it instead politically, finding in Gifford’s Tory associations with George Canning a model of political corruption that he understands through Jonson’s texts.

  But as the forms in which writers are received are various, so have I quite positively sought to embrace a variety of methodological approaches in my work. Besides, therefore, inclusive accounts of Jonson’s theatrical, critical, and editorial reception in Part I, I therefore offer in Part II a series of close, contextual readings in allusive and adaptive relationships with Jonson in the Romantic age. This work, whose conceptual underpinnings ₃₀ N. W. Bawcutt, ‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic

  

Drama’, in R. T. Davies and B. G. Beatty, eds., Literature of the Romantic Period, 1750–1850

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976), 96–113; Donald J. Rulfs, ‘Reception of the

Elizabethan Playwrights on the London Stage 1776–1833’, Studies in Philology, 46 (1949),

  

Introduction

  I discuss in Chapter 5, with Waldron and The Sad Shepherd again my point of entry, seeks a historically serviceable analogy for the understanding of allusion to Jonson in the economic concerns of the early nineteenth century. In Chapter 6, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as my focus, I offer this understanding as a counterpart to Christopher Ricks’s valuable

  31

  formulation of ‘The Poet as Heir’; in Chapter 7, I continue this enquiry by discussing the influence of Jonson on Coleridge’s imaginative relations with Robert Southey, and the impact of his Jonsonian criticism on Hartley Coleridge. This methodologically varied work helps to enrich our appreciation of Jonson’s variety in the period: Coleridge’s example is important precisely because he thinks at some distance from those writers discussed in Part I, thereby forcing upon us the necessity of accommodating divergent material to our understanding.

  Jonson was available to writers of the Romantic age in more ways than we have previously been willing to grant. Yes, Wordsworth did find in Jonson’s Prologue to the revised folio Every Man in his Humour the resonant phrase ‘deeds, and language, such as men do use’, an important precedent for the ‘selection of language really used by men’ described

  32

  in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802). But so too did William Blake’s earliest critics look to Jonson as a point of comparison, finding an _{. . .} ‘accord’ between the two poets ‘not in the words nor in the subject _{. . .} but in the style of thought, and the date of the expression’; Frederick Tatham, in his ‘Life of Blake’, praised Blake’s early lyrics as ‘equal to Ben

33 Johnson’. And how, if Jonson is to remain marginal to our accounts of

  the Romantic age, are we to account for moments such as this in Keats’s letter to Fanny Brawne of February 1820, where difficulties with his pen coincide delightfully with a practical engagement with Jonson?

  

The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it and still it is very much inclin’d to

make blind es. However these last lines are in a much better style of penmanship

thof [sic] a little disfigured by the smear of black currant jelly; which has made a

little mark on one of the Pages of Brown’s Ben Jonson, the very best book he has.

₃₁ Christopher Ricks, ‘Dryden and Pope’, in his Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford

  

University Press, 2002), 9–42, revised from first publication as ‘Allusion: The Poet as Heir’,

in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds., Studies in the Eighteenth Century III, (Canberra:

Australian National University Press, 1976), 209–40. ₃₂ W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), i. 123. ₃₃ B. H. Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), and Tatham, ‘Life of Blake’

  

(?1832), in G. E. Bentley, jun., ed., William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge

  

Introduction

I have lick’d it but it remains very purple—I did not know whether to say purple

₃₄ or blue, so in the mixture of the thought wrote purplue[.]