Things as They Are and the World of Absolutes in Jonson’s Plays and Masques

Abstract

Ben Jonson’s attention to theatrical detail is everywhere apparent. Much more often than Shakespeare (though not as often as we sometimes wish), he describes precisely a piece of stage business: “Edgworth gets up to him, and tickles him in the eare with a straw twice to draw his hand out of his pocket.‘‘¹ Such stage directions seem to serve well a classical theory of comic mimesis which he often stated: no “Tales,” no “Tempests,” just “deedes, and language, such as men doe use” (Bartholomew Fair, Ind., 1. 130; Everyman in His Humour, Prol. 1. 21). Yet no one who knows Jon-son would make the rash leap from the evidence of this concern with the precise rendering of everyday reality onstage to the conclusion that Jonson was what the late nineteenth century called a realist. Equally clear is a very different concern. Gabriele Jackson opens her study of Vision and Judgment in Ben Jonson’s Drama (New Haven, 1968) with the sentence: “To read Jonsonian drama is to come immediately and repeatedly upon the distinction between things as they are and things as they should be and to witness over and over the ritual of converting the one into the other.” As satirist and teacher Jonson must project in the theatre more than careful observation.