Five Plays [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION It is not easy to fix on a single image of Ben Jonson. We may think of him first as the boy put unwillingly to the craft of bricklaying, who then went soldiering in the Low Countries, began a turbulent career in the theatre by being imprisoned for his part in The Isle of Dogs and by killing Gabriel Spencer in a duel, and survived further friction with authority to become a legend at the Mermaid tavern for his conviviality and his corpulence. In another tradition, Jonson is the austere classicist of Elizabethan drama, writing with a high moral purpose and fastidiously editing his work for posterity. He figures in a third tradition as the comic playwright revelling in the bustle and clamour of London life, celebrating the rogue and the trickster, and presenting an ambivalent moral world. Each of these versions is well founded, and much of the fascination of Jonson's work comes from the tensions set up amongst them. The combative, idiosyncratic Jonson rebukes his audience for failing to appreciate what is set before it, and disdains such current fashions as the sormet, the essay, and the romance. His sense of mission is declared from one prologue to another, and is felt especially in his pride in dedicating Volpone to 'the two famous Universities', and in his repeated citing of the maxim of Florus, that while mayors and sheriffs are created every year, poets and kings are much rarer births. The plays themselves take such delight in the follies they expose that morality may seem to be subverted, with Jonson presiding as a lord of misrule. The motto on the title-page of Every Man in his Humour, Haut tamen invideas vati, quern pulpita pascunt (You need not begrudge the poets who gain their living from the stage—Juvenal, vii. 93) may suggest a dramatist who is embattled, yet conscious of his own dignity. The quarto text had an additional line from Juvenal, Quod non dant proceres, dabit Histrio (What no great men give you, the stage-player shall—ix. 90). The prologue to Every Man in his Humour, dismissing other theatrical entertainments which are in vogue, asserts a serious role for the play which follows, although without explaining the 'humour' mentioned in its title. The four humours of medieval physiology—blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy—derived from the combination of the four elements.