Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater: To Coin the Spirit, Spend the Soul

by John Gordon Sweeney

Overview

This book is a study of Ben Jonson's relationship with his audience in the public theater, as the relationship changed in the course of his career from the comical satires to Bartholomew Fair.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612232
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #619
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

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Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater

To Coin the Spirit, Spend the Soul

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By John Gordon Sweeney III

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06622-6

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CHAPTER 1

The Comical Satires

    With no lesse pleasure, then we have beheld
    This precious christall, worke of rarest wit,
    Our eye doth reade thee (now enstil'd) our Crites;
    Whom learning, vertue, and our favour last,
    Exempteth from the gloomy multitude.

I

Ben Jonson took considerable care to make Every Man Out of His Humor, Cynthia's Revels, and Poetaster look like a trilogy on dramatic satire. The 1616 Folio presents these three plays as "comical satyres," and for all the satire in the rest of Jonson's drama, no other play bears on its title page a reference to the genre. Moreover, the plays are enclosed as a group by two formidable statements about Jonsonian satire, the induction to Every Man Out, which establishes the grounds of his commitment to the genre, and Poetaster's Apologetical Dialogue, which cuts short that commitment as Jonson heads for Sejanus and the aloof regions of tragedy. In short, the comical satires ask to be taken as a phase of Jonson's career, but criticism has been slow to consider the offer seriously. 0. J. Campbell's Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is the exception, and perhaps the breadth of this study and the fact that the comical satires are neither the best nor the easiest to handle of Jonson's works have kept the field relatively clear.

Campbell treats the plays as Jonson's "program for the creation of dramatic satire to meet a persistent social and intellectual interest of his age," as a public phenomenon, discounting the private side of Jonson's artistic development and the ways in which his plays constantly address the question of his authority in the theater. This private side is what interests me, particularly since the step from Every Man In His Humor to Every Man Out of His Humor is an astonishing change in direction. Nothing in the record of his career suggests why, at this moment, Jonson was drawn to a "program" in the first place, or why, after The Case is Altered and Every Man In His Humor, two relatively straightforward and critically unencumbered plays, Jonson appended to this play such curiosities as an induction that runs to nearly four hundred lines and covers everything from Renaissance psychology to the history of dramatic theory; a chorus composed of two characters who sit onstage offering comments on the action that are far more distracting than useful; and, for the published version of the play, a dramatis personae rounded out by prose sketches of each character. Perhaps this was Jonson's response to early posturing in the Stage Quarrel; it could be that he simply wanted to do something new, to make a name for himself apart from more conventional comic writers. Whatever the case, Every Man Out represents a major change of psychic weather. It is not just a new choice of subject or genre but a radical shift in Jonson's relation to his audience. Its induction contains his first serious attempt to alter the conventional distance between stage and spectator by breaking the single-perspective plane in which "realistic" drama operates. It is a stunning moment when Asper looks with surprise to the audience and declares, "I not observ'd this thronged round till now./Gracious, and kind spectators, you are welcome" (Induction, 51-52). What began as an event confined to the stage as represented action suddenly has become self-consciously theatrical, acknowledging itself as drama enacted before an audience in the theater, "this thronged round." Nor is this a facile trick of the eye like many of the witty asides in other plays of the period. It goes to the heart of Jonson's artistic intent; the remainder of the induction examines in detail what the play hopes to accomplish in relation to its audience, that is, both how the spectators are to behave and what the play will offer them in return for their attention and understanding. Jonson negotiates a "contract" in which Asper promises "musicke worth your eares" and offers generously: "Let me be censur'd by th'austerest brow,/Where I want arte, or judgement, taxe me freely" (Induction, 60-61). This in return for "attentive auditors,/Such as will joyne their profit with their pleasure,/And come to feed their understanding parts" (Induction, 201-3).

Whatever interest they claim in their own right, the questions of theory and form raised in the induction also reflect Jonson's ambivalence toward the role of satirist. A serious conflict is represented in the tone of the induction, though it is difficult to say whether it is the result or the cause of the impulse to alter the conventional relationship between stage and gallery. On one hand, the induction attempts to establish a new level of intimacy between author and audience; on the other it attempts to justify the venting of a tremendous amount of aggression toward the same audience. The justification is based upon an apparently reasonable distinction between the judicious portion of the audience, those who earn the pleasure Jonson offers, and the fools who are to be scourged and driven from the theater. But scrutiny reveals the strain in the scheme to dichotomize the audience. Asper's brave declaration, "Let me be censur'd" receives the following qualification seventy-five lines later:

    Doe not I know the times condition?
    Yes, Mitis, and their soules, and who they be,
    That eyther will, or can except against me.
    None, but a sort of fooles, so sicke in taste,
    That they contemne all phisicke of the mind,
    And, like gald camels, kicke at every touch.
    Good men, and vertuous spirits, that lothe their vices,
    Will cherish my free labours, love my lines.

    (Induction, 128-35)

This is a subtle but momentous shift of the responsibility for judging the play. What Asper gives in the first place, he revokes in the second: we are free to judge, but if we judge negatively, the privilege is essentially revoked. This is a trap, a double bind of which neither Asper nor Jonson, I think, is aware; and it is repeated in Asper's final lines: "If we faile,/ We must impute it to this onely chance,/'Arte hath an enemy cal'd Ignorance." His failure, in other words, is our ignorance.

The nexus of this conflict is best revealed in Asper's use of one of Jonson's favorite metaphors for his theater, borrowed from Cicero, the "speculum consuetudinis":

    Well I will scourge those apes;
    And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirrour,
    As large as is the stage, whereon we act:
    Where they shall see the times deformitie
    Anatomiz'd in every nerve, and sinnew,
    With constant courage, and contempt of feare.

    (Induction, 117-22)

The problem is that mirrors reflect the images of their beholders; thus, how is it that courteous eyes should see deformities? Though we ought to be wary of demanding scientific accuracy of poets, still Jonson has made a problem for himself, one that might be more easily dismissed as an imprecise metaphor were it not for the fact that this kind of inconsistency keeps surfacing throughout his work.

Jonson's unwitting complication of what are offered initially as simple judgmental problems and distinctions suggests that his attempts to dichotomize his audience served ends other than, or in addition to, the accurate reflection of the playhouse audience. He used his playhouse audience to reflect the confusion in his own mind over what seemed to him two irreconcilable aspects of his role as a dramatic satirist: the entertainer, with what that implied for him in terms of seduction, and the teacher, with what that implied in terms of brutal domination. The conventional rhetoric of furor poeticus and the cankered muse explains a good deal about how Jonson drew Asper's character, but it does not begin to explain the complex commitment Asper feels toward his attentive auditors. Though he mentions contributing to their "profit," he eventually transcends the world of discursive and didactic meaning, alluding instead to a sensual world beyond words: he will make music. For his attentive auditors, he says:

    Ile prodigally spend my selfe,
    And speake away my spirit into ayre;
    For these, Ile melt my braine into invention,
    Coine new conceits, and hang my richest words
    As polisht jewels in their bounteous eares.

    (Induction, 204-8)

And so rapt in this sensuous rhetoric is Asper that he forgets himself and delays unwittingly the opening of the play:

    But stay, I loose my selfe, and wrong their patience;
    If I dwell here, they'le not begin, I see.

One need not even mention the puns on "spend," "spirit," "coine," and "conceits," intended or not, to point out that this is a world of emotional intimacy. Hanging polished jewels in bounteous ears is for lovers, and this aspect of the satirist stands in direct opposition to the earlier violence: "I would give them pills to purge," and:

    Ile strip the ragged follies of the time,
    Naked, as at their birth ... and with a whip of Steele,
    Print wounding lashes in their yron ribs.

The two experiences Jonson imagines in the theater are extreme opposites, and while the induction attempts to deal with this opposition by splitting the audience, it never fully resolves the inconsistency. Here intimacy and hostility are inextricably linked, and the appearance of this conflict coincides, significantly, with Jonson's attempts to alter his relationship with his spectators.

This confusion is part of the larger problem of authority in Every Man Out. Where do we place Jonson in relation to Asper and Macilente? Who takes responsibility for the values expressed in the play? In a play in which narrative and representational integrity are paramount, one might ask whether the question itself is appropriate, whether anyone can be said to speak for the author. In Every Man Out, however, we have the opposite problem, too many spokesmen. In addition to Asper and Macilente, Mitis, Cordatus, and Carlo Buffone play important roles in the chain of command, and perhaps what is most telling is the difficulty Jonson has in establishing a clear and consistent judgmental perspective. Asper is listed in the dramatis personae as the "presenter," whatever that means. The play itself never makes the attribution, and on the basis of the induction there is very little to distinguish him from the author. Mitis calls it "his," Asper's play. Asper's declaration:

    Ile prodigally spend my selfe,
    And speake away my spirit into ayre;
    ... Ile melt my braine into invention,
    Coine new conceits, and hang my richest words
    As polisht jewels in their bounteous eares

and his command of literary theory make it appear that he wrote the play and wants only the name to be the stage representative of the real author. Indeed his whole bearing is one of authorial presence. We are led to believe that Asper will go off after the induction to play his role in the drama, leaving his two friends Mitis and Cordatus to maintain his interests with the audience. Furthermore, after those two continue at some length the discussion of dramatic theory and history, we assume that the play will operate on two planes, the stage action and the commentary supplied by Jonson as a buffer between stage and gallery.

But Jonson immediately complicates this arrangement. When the confusion over who will speak the prologue threatens to suspend indefinitely the play's beginning, Carlo Buffone, a character who otherwise has no life beyond the limits of the main stage action, steps up to offer his own prologue — as if he need pay no attention to any distinction between the world of the play and the world of its audience:

    Here's a cup of wine sparkles like a diamond.
    Gentlewomen (I am sworne to put them in first)
    and Gentlemen, a round, in place of a bad prologue,
    I drinke this good draught to your health here,
    Canarie, the very Elix'r and spirit of wine.

    (Induction, 330-34)

The notion of toast as prologue charmingly undercuts Asper's self-righteous rant, and as Carlo continues he announces that he knows the real author and gives a speech that identifies the author as Ben Jonson or the Ben Jonson caricature that would have passed current with the knowledgeable portion of the theatergoing public:

This is that our Poet calls Castalian liquor, when hee comes abroad (now and then) once in a fortnight, and makes a good meale among Players, where he has Caninum appetitum: mary, at home he keepes a good philosophicall diet, beanes and butter milke: an honest pure Rogue, hee will take you off three, foure, five of these, one after another, and looke vilanously when he has done, like a one-headed Cerberus (he do' not heare me I hope) and then (when his belly is well ballac't, and his braine rigg'd a little) he sailes away withall, as though he would worke wonders when he comes home.

(Induction, 334-45)

It is a funny moment, but a dizzying one as well. It leaves one perplexed over what to do about Asper and the elaborate fiction Jonson has made for him, because Asper's and Carlo's "authors" are not at all the same; in fact, it is the latter who suddenly appears to have the greater claim on reality. There is a fundamental problem about Jonson's investment in these two characters that the rest of the play never confronts.

To complicate things even further, Mitis and Cordatus treat Carlo as if he were a real man who is to impersonate himself in the play, but Cordatus scathes him with the description of his character that Jonson put into the dramatis personae along with the descriptions of Mitis and Cordatus. Thus, Carlo seems to exist in Jonson's world, though we know he does not, and that world seems the same as the world of Mitis and Cordatus, though at other times it does not, which means that Asper, Carlo, and Ben Jonson all seem to exist in the same plane of reality, though they do not.

The induction tramples the conventional boundaries between stage and audience, playfully but thoroughly, and once the play begins matters only get worse. One is never quite sure in the course of the action how to take Macilente and Carlo. As satiric commentators they present a great deal of the action to us, but they are also characters in the play who are objects of the satire. This would not necessarily be a problem, were it not that the induction stresses so heavily the need to establish one's judgmental bearings. Nothing in Asper's theorizing prepares us for Carlo, who is very funny as he lovingly exposes the fools to full view but is dismissed by the commentators Mitis and Cordatus as a "violent rayler."

Macilente is also complex, insofar as he bears the burden of moral outrage in the play while envy sullies his personal integrity. Theoretically, Macilente's situation is not as difficult as Carlo's, because the play takes as its aim cleansing Macilente and thereby purging moral outrage of self-interest in the satirist, a conventional satiric plot. What really complicates our response to Macilente, however, is Jonson's inconsistent treatment of the character. We sense him making fun of Macilente for the extremity of his response to the condition of the world, even though Asper's diatribe in the induction seems not simply to justify but even to require the most extreme response to the world. Indeed Macilente's own opening speech makes powerful claims on our sympathy:

    Viri est, fortunae caecitatem facilè ferre.
    Tis true; but Stoique, where (in the vast world)
    Doth that man breathe, that can so much command
    His bloud, and his affection? well: I see,
    I strive in vaine to cure my wounded soule;
    For every cordiall that my thoughts apply,
    Turnes to a cor'sive, and doth eate it farder.
    There is no taste in this Philosophie,
    Tis like a potion that a man should drinke,
    But turnes his stomacke with the sight of it.
    I am no such pild Cinique, to beleeve
    That beggery is the onely happiness;
    Or (with a number of these patient fooles)
    To sing: My minde to me a kingdome is,
    When the lanke hungrie belly barkes for foode.

    (I, i, 1-15)

This is hardly the foundation on which to base the subsequent ironic treatment of the character. Macilente's points seem reasonable, and the snarls at Cinique and Stoique carry a lot of force. They argue that this is a character who feels real human emotions, who has normal expectations of life, and whose envy and rage are appropriate to the circumstances. Again we have a problem with frame of reference in a play that cannot make up its mind about what it values.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater by John Gordon Sweeney III. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Introduction. The Self-Seeking Spectator, pg. 1
• Chapter One. The Comical Satires, pg. 17
• Chapter Two. Sejanus: The People's Beastly Rage, pg. 47
• Chapter Three. Volpone: “Fooles, They Are the Onely Nation Worth Mens Envy, or Admiration.”, pg. 70
• Chapter Four. Epicene: “I’le Doe Good To No Man Against His Will.”, pg. 105
• Chapter Five. The Alchemist: “Yet I Put My Selfe on You”, pg. 125
• Chapter Six. Bartholomew Fair: Jonson's Masque for the Multitude, pg. 157
• Chapter Seven. Beyond Bartholomew Fair, pg. 190
• Conclusion. The Theater of Self-Interest, pg. 207
• Notes, pg. 229
• Index, pg. 241