Abstract
Ben Jonson was not a republican. Ben Jonson was not an absolutist. Ben Jonson desired a limited monarchy. Ben Jonson believed in republicanism. Ben Jonson did not counsel the abolition of monarchy. Ben Jonson sought to extend the rights of the monarch’s subjects. All of these contradictory statements, and more, are true about the paradoxical figure of Ben Jonson, public theatre dramatist and court masquer.
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Notes
New Historicist readings of Jonson have tended to concentrate on his masque productions; see, for example, Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965; repr. 1981) and his The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
It should be emphasized from the outset that I am using the term ‘radical’ in a pre-1650s sense. The complicated ramifications of the term in that later period of political conflict can be seen, for example, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London and New York: Longman, 1989). Here I am using the term in the 1620s and 1630s sense to suggest an opposition to current governmental practice but not necessarily deep political radicalism in the sense of active republicanism.
With current interest in the early modern marketplace, largely influenced by Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Jonson is re-entering the Cultural Materialist debate.
Richard Dutton’s Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1996) engages with related questions. My argument remains, however, that the interest in Jonson as either masquer or as proto-capitalist rarely depicts him in a radical political vein. Martin Butler’s recent cluster of articles has proved invaluable in reclaiming Jonson s later plays for socio-historical consideration but has tended to support a rather more traditional, orthodox reading of the author himself. See, for example, ‘Stuart Politics in A Tale of a Tub’, Modern Language Review, 85 (1990), 12–28, ‘Late Jonson’, in Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (eds), The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 166–88, and ‘Ben Jonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1994) pp. 91–116. Feminist and Queer Theory are just beginning to ’discover’ Jonson;
see Kate Chedgzoy, Julie Sanders and Susan Wiseman, ‘Introduction: Refashioning Ben Jonson’, in Julie Sanders with Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman (eds), Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics, and the Jonsonian Canon (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 1–27.
Thomas Healÿ’s overview of Renaissance theory, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Arnold, 1992) repeats this formulaic reading of Jonson’s Works (pp. 41–2).
For a more nuanced assessment, see Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen (eds), Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1991). Dutton, Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism argues for a post-1616 ‘King’s Poet’.
Recent biographies have tended to confirm this image: see David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)
and W. David Kay, Ben Jonson: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1995).
For a detailed examination of these ideas, see David Wootton s introductory essay to his edited collection Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–41 (esp. pp. 1–6).
John Morrill, in The Nature of the English Revolution (London and New York: Longman, 1993), argues that parliamentarians ‘fought the English civil war not to abolish monarchy but to control it’ (p. 16).
Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism, 1649–1656’, in Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, pp. 45–81 (p. 50). See also his ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), 1–15 (p. 6).
Richard Machin and Christopher Norris, Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 6–7.
Markku Peltonen has argued that this is a feature of humanist republican discourse throughout this period; see his Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 309.
Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 210–44 (p. 212).
See Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism. See also Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)
and Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 182–200, and ‘English Republicanism’, in J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443–75.
See also Jonathan Scott, ‘The English Republican Imagination’, in John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s (London: Collins and Brown, 1992), pp. 35–54.
It is interesting to note that the main expositor of Machiavellian political theory in Dutch writing at this time was Justus Lipsius, the influence of whose writings on Jonson has been charted by Robert C. Evans in Jonson, Lipsius, and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism (Wakefield, NH: Longwood, 1992) and in his article ’Sejanus: Ethics and Politics in the Early Reign of James’, in Sanders, Chedgzoy and Wiseman (eds), Refashioning Ben Jonson, pp. 71–92.
See also Daniel Boughner, ‘Jonsori s Use of Lipsius in Sejanus’, Modern Language Notes, 73 (1958), 247–54 and ‘Sejanus and Machiavelli’, Studies in English Literature, 1 (1960), 81–101.
Jonson famously cites Machiavellï’s The Prince in his commonplace book Timber; or, Discoveries and it is a case that The Prince largely determined Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic understanding of Machiavelli. That is not to say that exposure to the more republican text of the Discourses was impossible; see Anne Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 115–30, for a related argument on Shakespeare and the Discourses. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Chapter 2.
Part of Jonson’s collection of political and religious writings by Lipsius included his translation of and commentary on Polybius. See David McPherson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), Texts and Studies No. 5.
Jonathan Goldberg in James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983), especially pp. 72–80, explores the republican and absolutist significances of this myth.
Eco Haitsma Mulier, ‘The Language of Seventeenth-Century Republicanism in the United Provinces: Dutch or European?’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 179–95 (p. 184).
Martin van Gelderen, ‘The Machiavellian Moment and the Dutch Revolt: The Rise of Neostoicism and Dutch Republicanism’, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 205–23.
See, for example, Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
and Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973; repr. 1991).
The experience and discourse of republicanism in America is intrinsically linked to the continental European tradition as J.G.A. Pocock points out in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
For the more complex reading of that term as covering three distinct revolts and a detailed history of the course of the conflict, see Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
There are obvious difficulties in citing as ‘truth’ Drummond’s subsequent gossipy notations of his conversations with Jonson, see Ian Donaldson’s introductory essay to his The Oxford Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Stephen Orgel, ‘What is a Text?’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 24 (1981), 3–6.
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© 1998 Julie Sanders
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Sanders, J. (1998). Introduction. In: Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389441_1
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