A First Interlude: ‘Sejanus his Fall’

Abstract

It is tempting to argue that Jonson found a mature style for comedy as a consequence of attempting unsuccessfully to write a tragedy. This would be unfair to Sejanus, which is a finer play than this comment would suggest; also the elements of what went to make Volpone the remarkable innovation that it is were all present in embryonic form in Jonson’s Elizabethan comedies, but there they were isolated, chance conceptions and had not yet found a right relation to each other. Shakespeare invariably turns at climactic moments in his plays, as Anne Barton has superbly demonstrated, to ‘the idea of the play’ itself, to the root facts of performance.¹ His characters, seeking to define a sudden acute awareness of the self, generally express that perception in metaphors about acting, about players that strut and fret upon the stage of life. As with all good metaphysical conceits, the effect is to sharpen one’s sense of the differences between the ideas brought into a sudden relation only to give greater immediacy to one’s sense of the manifest similarities. For the audience the impact is at once to make them both conscious of themselves as present at a theatre and conscious of the artifice of performance while bringing them into a greater imaginative empathy with the characters in their moments of crisis.