Ben Jonson was the acknowledged literary lord of the early seventeenth century. From the court entertainments for James and Charles to the dramas for the popular and private playhouses, from the poetomachian struggles with John Marston and Thomas Dekker at the turn of the century to those with Inigo Jones concerning the proper presentation of masques a quarter of a century later, his influence and irascibility were a part of the intellectual milieu of the day. Seventeen of his dramas survive, fifteen comedies and two tragedies, though contemporary references indicate some of his other works, especially those before 1598, have been lost.1 He stands alongside Shakespeare as, if not the most prolific, the most artistic and influential dramatist in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. In fact, in the past century a critic concluded that “although Shakespeare is the central figure in our dramatic literature, Jonson is certainly the central figure in our dramatic history.”2 More recently, G. E. Bentley, working primarily with the Shakespeare and Jonson allusion books and counting 1,839 allusions to Jonson and 1,430 to Shakespeare, has asserted that Jonson was “clearly the dramatist of the seventeenth century.”3 No doubt the enormous enthusiasm for Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, crystallized in the idolatry of Shakespeare by the Romantic critics, has tended to obscure this fact even for most students of literature. Certainly, the contemporary evidence—the court record and the commemorative poems which poured forth upon his death—indicates the wide range of Jonson’s influence.
Subsequent generations of readers, theatergoers, and critics have acknowledged the comparable stature of the work of both playwrights. The final phase of the canons, however, produces a signal contrast. In the minds of most critics Shakespeare’s last period—involving his return to happy comedy and the themes of his youth, his ascent to the heights, his renewed philosophic composure, and his development of the pastoral tragicomedy—represents a rich and peaceful appraisal of life despite the depths of his tragic comprehension. Shakespeare, so fantasy insists, in the person of Prospero bade a master’s farewell to his art and in triumph exited the London stage to live his last years at Stratford in relative prosperity. In contrast, Jonson spent the greater part of his last twelve years in the sick chamber in Westminster.4 The influences of paralytic strokes, loss of court preferment, and plays which on occasion failed to outlive their initial performance combined to produce in him long years of increasing disability.
The plays following Bartholomew Fair in 1614 and The Devil Is an Ass in 1616—The Staple of News (1625), The New Inn (1629), and The Magnetic Lady (1632)—most commonly are said to reflect this waning of the author’s physical and intellectual vigor.5 Writing in 1668, thirty-one years after Jonson’s death, John Dryden established a critical standard which has never been seriously challenged: “As for Jonson . . . if we look upon him while he was himself (for his last plays were but dotages) I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had.”6 To be sure, these late works shared the advantages of Jonson’s contemporary reputation. In the seventeenth century the “dotages” were referred to more often than King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice;7 John Cotgrave, in his The English Treasury of Wit and Language Collected Out of the Most Important and Best of our English Dramatic Poems (1655), quoted three passages from The Devil Is an Ass, four from The New Inn, and six from The Staple of News;8 Ben’s Sons wrote numerous lyrics in defense and praise of Jonson’s late work. Yet the full story is not revealed in such statistics. From their very inception the late comedies have been branded as old-age dotages when compared with the great comedies or as splenetic constructions of a dramatist whose power had waned. Not a single performance of any of these works is recorded between 1660 and 1776,9 and their stage history before 1642 is limited to a record of their original performances.10 For that matter, Dryden’s indictment was preceded in 1645 by George Wither’s condemnation:
And since his New Inn too had got a crack,
He bids him take the sugar loaves and sack.
To make his lov’d Magnetic Lady glad,
That still (for want of applause) was sad.11
Likewise, Henry Harrington remarked that Jonson was not “a strong dramatist until the end,”12 and Robert Wild found nothing to praise in the work of Jonson’s final years:
Poets who others can Immortal make,
When they grow Gray, their Laurels them forsake;
.....
’Twas not Terce Claret, Eggs, and Muskadine,
No Goblets Crowned with Greek or Spanish Wine,
Could make new Flames in Old Ben Jonson’s Veins,
But his Attempts prov’d lank and languid strains.13
While subsequent criticism has offered little to alter these opinions, several more recent condemnations have been couched rather hesitatingly. One nineteenth-century reviewer, for example, has remarked that Jonson’s late works show signs of falling off, though his dotages would gain the easy advantage when compared with any contemporary productions.14 William Gifford grants that they “want indeed much of the freedom and vigour of his early performances; but they exhibit no signs of mental imbecility.”15 Felix E. Schelling, observing that the last plays revert to caricature and allegory, believes that the moral is too heavy and that the satire degenerates into personal lampoon; however, “the scathing generalisation of Dryden that designated them ‘Jonson’s dotages’ is unfair to their genuine merits.”16 A. W. Ward and Alexander Chalmers agree that Jonson’s works of the late period show unmistakable marks of the decay of his powers.17 This critical neglect or damning with faint praise is characteristic of our present-century criticism as well. The comments of Elisabeth Woodbridge, Brinsley Nicholson, G. G. Smith, John Palmer, and J. A. Symonds are aptly summarized by Wallace A. Bacon: “The opinion is unanimous that in them [the late comedies] Jonson’s powers decrease, whatever the cause imputed.”18
Though the critics seemingly present a solid and imposing front, there are significant contradictions. Several have admitted the plays would stand up well indeed if they did not constantly have to exist in the shadow of Jonson’s great comedies. In a recent study Robert E. Knoll quite frankly supposes that, were the minor work “by any hand but Jonson’s, it would not be neglected; it has its merits and its charms. Jonson’s best drives out his good.”19 Then, too, critical attention to the plays has been remarkably superficial, and glib generalities have become conventional. We read of “mumblings of familiar things,” “too great a tendency to emphasize the moral structure and even to introduce purely allegorical figures,” “application of a process from habit rather than inspiration,” “an undeniable decline of his great powers.”20 Commentary has occasionally seized upon some aspect of topical significance, for example the sham demoniac possession in The Devil Is an Ass or the motif of platonic love in The New Inn, and has so distorted its importance that the entire dramatic fabric collapses.
Failing to consider the work as a dramatic entity tempts one too easily to brand the piece inconsistent, artificial, and decadent. Actually, each segment of any satiric plot illumines the real world or is related to it in some way, but the logic of that relationship can be fully appreciated only through an understanding of the total stage world. As individual exercises, valid in their own right, the plays have rarely if ever been given a fair and unprejudiced evaluation in the light of Jonson’s theories of art. The Devil Is an Ass, for example, is Jonson’s attack upon the charlatan projector and his associates who prey on a credulous and money-crazed citizenry. For his satiric purposes the dramatist creates a morality structure in which a bumbling everyman, Fitzdottrel, is besieged on the one hand by the projector and on the other by the devil, Pug. Never has the play been judged on the basis of how successfully the inclusion of a devil figure aids in effecting censure upon Meercraft, the projector, and Fitzdottrel, the undisciplined intellect (i.e., laughter at the expense of the guller and the gulled alike). Instead, the play has been judged on the irrelevant bases of Pug as an unsuccessful Faustian figure or an allegorically-drawn portrait which weakens a comic realism best seen in The Alchemist, Epicoene, and Bartholomew Fair. In The Staple of News Jonson describes the undisciplined newsmongers who controlled the news trade in its infancy. Prepared to manufacture or modify news to meet the market created by a gullible public, the newsmen as well as their readers fall under the poet’s censure. In this instance, Jonson appropriately sets forth as his center of activity a prodigal son—undisciplined both in the use of his apparent inheritance and in his interest in the operation of a news staple. Critics who assume that Jonson is, in senile fashion, reverting to older dramatic motifs have not considered how effectively such a variation of the prodigal son story achieves its contemporary satiric purposes. The New Inn and The Magnetic Lady are the aging dramatist’s final attacks upon what he considered the decadence of romantic comedy. The plot of The New Inn, abounding in mistaken identities, disguises, and reunited families, attacks also through parody the raging court fad of Henrietta Maria’s coterie. Yet, not until the present generation has this play been viewed as parodic, not straight-faced, romantic comedy including chastisement rather than servile reflection of the queen’s neoplatonic love cult. The Magnetic Lady—with its elaborate interact conversation concerning the academic structure of the play and with its parade of humour characters before the “center attractive” (a marriageable heiress)—is commonly ignored as the final dregs of dramatic dissipation. To the contrary, close consideration reveals a carefully ordered allegorical attack upon romantic comedy and its author, an attack which, if too complex for success on the public stage, is hardly the production of a weakened mind.
It is not so surprising that these late works are found less popular than his major comedy. The contemporary record of such dramas as Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair is its own verification of their success. What is surprising, however, is the general neglect of the late comedies or the charge that Jonson, less interested in the derisive unmasking of fools, has sacrificed his artistic principles to the desire for regaining public favor at any cost. Careful attention to both major and minor work usually follows as a matter of course for a figure of acknowledged literary importance and influence. Yet, since Dryden’s critical pronouncement, studies of Jonson’s dramaturgy have generally passed over his late work as unworthy of serious concern. In all probability Dryden used “dotage” to describe the overingenious plotting of the plays; and certainly Jonson, in his struggles against the rising popular tide of formless romantic comedy, is concerned with a rigidly precise conformity to the academic principles of five-act structure and the presentation of comedy as a satiric exposure of human folly. Even so, Dryden’s remark has been too readily accepted by subsequent generations as a quality judgment to describe works unworthy of serious consideration.
This study is undertaken in light of this neglect. Its purpose, it should be understood from the outset, is not to record a history of previous criticism, though for each play a brief statement can illustrate how little it has been the object of serious concern. Neither will there be any attempt as such to defend these works as effective stage plays; although in many respects this might be considered a natural corollary to the discussion, it lies beyond the limits of a single observer writing from the disarming perspective of the armchair. The primary purpose is to demonstrate that Jonson’s comic intent, his theory of art, and his manipulation of material for both instruction and entertainment, is precisely that of his acknowledged masterpieces and that the plays can hardly be branded “dotages” of a “washed-out brain.” The term “dotage” needs qualification. It might well describe the work of Jonson’s old age which failed to win popular acclaim, but it hardly suggests the care and precision with which the plays were constructed. Although the effecting of a comic intent in each of the late plays differs markedly, the demand on a rationale and the impetus to explore are as powerful as ever.