“Nothing but the truth”: Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Rumors

Abstract

I begin this chapter concerning the gendered spaces of rumor and the fantasy of a listening audience in the dramatic works of Ben Jonson by considering two conflicting accounts of the responsible parties of London’s noise in the seventeenth century. At the bottom of the broadside Tittle-Tattle; Or, the several Branches of Gossipping (1600/1603) (Figure 4.1) appears a thirty-six-line poem:

At Child-bed when the Gossips meet, Fine Stories we are told; And if they get a Cup too much, Their Tongues they cannot hold.

At Market when good Housewives meet, Their Market being done, Together they will crack a Pot, Before they can get Home.

They are an odious, and vile kind of creatures, that fly about the house all day; and picking up the filth of the house, like pies or swallows, carry it to their nest (the lord’s ears) and oftentimes report the lies they have feigned, for what they have seen and heard.

Benjonson, Timber, or Discoveries