Roman Frames of Mind

  • Julie Sanders
Chapter

Abstract

Ancient Rome, republican or otherwise, loomed large in Jonson’s creative and political imagination. Not only was he well-read in the writings stemming from that period, he was committed to scholarly reconstructions of classical Rome for both comic and tragic dramatic purposes. Rome fascinated him as both an aesthetic and political community, providing him with clear paradigms against which to measure his contemporary situation. Jonson used this comparative dynamic in different ways at different times — in alternately ambiguous and precise fashion depending on the context. In his 1601 ‘comicall satire’ Poetaster he explored the aesthetic community or republic of letters of Augustan Rome, creating for dramatic purposes an ahistorical triad of writers vying for the ‘Emperor’s’ favour — Ovid, Horace and Virgil.1 In the later tragedies, Sejanus, His Fall (1603) and Catiline, His Conspiracy (1610–11), he employed Roman, and ostensibly republican, political communities for the purpose of comparison with his own age. This chapter will use the tragedies and a consideration of the source materials they were inspired by to account for this comparative dynamic and these distinctly ‘Roman frames of mind’ in Jonson’s dramatic canon.2

Keywords

Political Community Comparative Dynamic Imperial Power Roman History Privy Council 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    See Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Arnold, 1983).Google Scholar
  2. See also Tom Cain’s introductory essay to his edition of Poetaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    The phrase is self-consciously borrowed from Katherine Eisaman Maus’s seminal text, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
  4. 3.
    Franco Moretti, ‘The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Shakespearean Tragedy (London and New York: Longman, 1992), pp. 45–83.Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    See Angela G. Dorenkamp, ‘Jonson’s Catiline: History as the Trying Faculty’, Studies in Philology, 67 (1970), 210–20Google Scholar
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  7. 6.
    For a detailed and scholarly account of Jonson’s engagement with Lipsius, see Robert C. Evans, Habit of Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading (New Jersey and London: Associated Universities Press, 1995).Google Scholar
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  10. 8.
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  12. and Niccolà Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker; intro. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).Google Scholar
  13. 9.
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  15. 10.
    Niccolô Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
  16. 11.
    Quentin Skinner has indeed argued that Machiavellï s language can be regarded as Ciceronian rather than Tacitean, which has important implications for Jonson’s characterization of Cicero in Catiline. See Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
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  18. 15.
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  19. 16.
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  22. 21.
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  23. 26.
    See Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, who discusses James’s relationship to the ‘spectacle of power’ and see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London and New York: Methuen, 1986).Google Scholar
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  27. 31.
    Anthony Miller, ‘The Roman State in Julius Caesar and Sejanus’, in Ian Donaldson (ed.), Jonson and Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, in association with the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 1983), pp. 179–201 (p. 194).Google Scholar
  28. Christopher Ricks relates this to a general theme of political and sexual dismemberment in the play: ‘Sejanus and Dismemberment’, Modern Language Notes, 76 (1961), 301–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  29. 33.
    Tullius Cicero, The Speeches, trans. R. Gardner (Chicago: Loeb Classical Library, 1958).Google Scholar
  30. 35.
    Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).Google Scholar
  31. 37.
    Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-Headed Monster’, in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, 2nd edn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), pp. 181–204 (p. 181).Google Scholar
  32. 38.
    Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson, His Vision and His Art (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 58.Google Scholar
  33. 39.
    Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 59.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Julie Sanders 1998

Authors and Affiliations

  • Julie Sanders
    • 1
  1. 1.Keele UniversityUK

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