To the Moon: Discovering the Comic in the Cosmic on the Early Modern English Stage

Abstract

Ben Jonson (1572–1637), bricklayer, soldier, actor and poet, was also the first playwright to “discover” life on the moon. In his masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620), two Heralds proclaim that a poet who recently visited the Moon has found a new world: an “Earth inhabited,” replete with “new creatures,”² aliens with hybrid identities who demonstrate characteristics of both male and female, human and animal. This new world, one Herald explains, contains the “Isle of the Epicoenes,” where “under one Article both kindes are signified, for they are fashioned alike, male and female the same” (ll. 275–78).³ And these androgynous Epicoenes have a unique trait: they reproduce by laying eggs (l. 285). From these eggs are born yet another Moon-species, the Volatees, a word coined by Jonson from the similar Latin word meaning flying or winged.⁴ It is an appropriate name given that the eggs reveal “a race of Creatures like men, but are indeed a sort of Fowle, in part covered with feathers” (286–88).

We have been led to the conclusion that we certainly see the surface of the Moon to be not smooth, even, and perfectly spherical, as the great crowd of philosophers have believed about this and other heavenly bodies, but, on the contrary, to be uneven, rough, and crowded with depressions and bulges. And it is like the face of the Earth itself.

—Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius ¹