One of the most amusingly perplexing aspects of The Staple of News is the contradictory nature of previous critical remarks concerning the merits of the play. On the one hand, we read that this “last complete and finished masterpiece of Jonson’s genius”1 is “a complex dramatic achievement”2 reflecting extraordinary merit.3 On the other, the play is called little more than a concoction of dotage ingredients4 characterized by a “heathy dryness”5 and belabored by “a good deal that is merely boring”6 and “incredibly dull.”7 Critics of the latter sort frequently recall the nine-year hiatus between The Devil Is an Ass (1616) and The Staple of News (1625), concluding that Jonson’s long absence from the stage is painfully evident and that his long association with the masque has led him to “in a sense a new kind of comedy.”8
Our point of departure for an analysis of this play is to recognize that, despite the interval of years, the dramatic method of The Staple of News is clearly anticipated in The Devil Is an Ass. The Staple of News represents again Jonson’s use of material from the native dramatic tradition—the morality motif and characters who carry both allegorical and realistic significance. At the same time we are able to determine the abiding principles of the poet’s comic intent and the means by which he maintains a comic tone even while utilizing such overt didactic techniques. That is, a consideration of his satiric treatment of the men and practices of early seventeenth-century journalism, his modifications of the prodigal son story, and his method of establishing a thematic connection between these strands of action will illustrate the manner in which he weaves the morality aspects, the “obtrusive moralizing,” into the comic fabric.
The main plot action describes the prodigal Penniboy Junior, his monetary extravagances, his exposure and expulsion by his father in disguise, and his final repentance and redemption. The protasis, acts I and II, introduces in turn Junior, Canter, and Senior, establishing the respective scale of values of each. The miserly Senior is the reverse of the prodigal. The foolishness and danger of both extremes is implied through Canter’s advice to Junior, who at twenty-one exults over the apparent death of his father and his coming of age. Without so much as examining the bills, Junior pays all his parasites and visits the office of Staple News, which Tom the barber tells him has been established in the very house in which he has chambers. Tom desires journalistic experience, and, when Junior purchases him a position, the operation of the staple (the gathering, vending, and dissemination of news) is revealed. Junior is awed by the various news departments and the “methods of collection and preparation” and hears of the courtship of Lady Pecunia. She, the ward of his uncle Richer Penniboy (Senior), is sought by several suitors, including Cymbal, Master of the Staple. Senior allows her to associate only with those through whom his financial status will be improved. Thus, he favors the courtship of Cymbal, who seemingly is engaged in a lucrative profession. Nevertheless, according to the terms of his brother’s will, Penniboy Senior must allow Junior to court his ward. When Pecunia enters, Junior fawningly offers to show her the staple. In the course of the action the spectator realizes that Junior’s father is not dead. Disguised as a poor attendant upon his newly rich son, Canter comments throughout the play as the choric observer.
The epitasis, acts III and IV, is concerned with the actual courtship of money (Pecunia), first at the news staple and later at the Devil Tavern. At the staple the prodigal urges her to become his mistress. Later, members of the staple staff urge her to become Cymbal’s mistress. After Junior finally wins her favor, he prostitutes her before all by bidding her to bestow kisses all around, an act symbolizing his mental and spiritual depravity. Senior, in his attempts to recover Pecunia, is thrown out of the house to “return to his kennels.” At this point the disguised father, able to bear no more, throws off his disguise, denounces his son as prodigal and incompetent, bequeaths him a ragged cloak, and exposes the superficiality of each jeerer in turn. Thus, we have arrived at the catastasis, or false resolution, at the end of act IV. Canter has exposed his son and brother to ignominious ridicule.
The catastrophe, act V, furnishes Junior the opportunity to regain his father’s favor. Canter, before disguising himself to test his son, had entrusted his entire estate to the lawyer Picklock, who was to administer it for the boy’s benefit. Picklock now proves false by denying Canter’s feoffment, intending to destroy both father and son financially. His scheme is overturned, however, by the son, who rescues his father from financial disaster and regains his rightful position. Father and son are reconciled, the dishonest Picklock is set in the pillory, Penniboy Junior is made the heir of Penniboy Senior (the miser), and the boy and Lady Pecunia are married.
The topical material, which no doubt caught the major interest of the spectator, again reveals Jonson as an acute observer of the contemporary scene, able and determined to make comedy a vehicle of social reform. The date of this play, 1625,9 is only four years after the foundation of what is generally called the first English newspaper. Even so, the practice of newsmongering and the abuses Jonson attacks were well established. Individual news pamphlets date back as far as the reign of Henry VIII, but it was during the years 1618-1625 that regularly published newspapers became firmly established. The outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618 and the ensuing problems to the throne and fortunes of an English princess had created throughout the country an interest in continental news that was without precedent. In the summer of 1621 sheets were printed “every week at least,” with all “manner of news, & a strange stuffe as any we have from Amsterdam.”10 The first newsbook numbered in a series was A Currant of General News, printed on May 18, 1622.11 Though there is no extant copy of this issue, a copy of the second number, May 23, does exist. This newsbook was confined to reports from the continent and often was merely a translation of German, Italian, or Dutch dispatches. It was not until 1641 that the Star Chamber decree against publication of domestic news was abolished. In October 1622 this first series was succeeded by another, similar in format and quality. While there is no consistent title, the one most commonly used was Weekly Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spaine, and France.12
Concerning both the integrity of the news and its physical format, a multitude of variations occurred among these early newsbooks which forces us to conclude that Jonson’s depiction of the staple and its mode of operation is not exaggerated. The only consistent elements were the placement of the date and the serial number and, most important, the sensational quality of the news. Staple news was the extraordinary, the abnormal, the prodigious. An unidentified author of an early coranto, cited by Stanley Morison in his study, claims that the reader was literally and gullibly news-hungry. If the printer lacked sufficient copy to meet a publication deadline, the public would clamor for news of any sort, trivial or serious, true or false. Obviously, such a receptive market invited scurrilous news-mongering. As a result, the reputable printer constantly felt constrained to defend his materials as meticulously accurate:
Custom is so predominant that bothe the Reader and the Printer of these pamphlets agree in their expectation of weekly newes, so that if the printer have not the wherewithall to afford satisfaction, yet will the Reader com and aske every day for any newes; not out of curiosity or wantonness but pretending a necessity either to please themselves or satisfie their customers. Therefore is the Printer, both with charge and pains taking, very careful to have his friends abroad supply his wants at home with pertinent letters, and acquaint him with the printed copies beyond the seas, that hee may acquaint you with such true intelligence as his fortune lights upon—so that according to the affaires published elsewhere, sometimes you may have two Corantoes in one week. Which, seeing it is for your owne sake, and especially that you may make the country afar off partake of our London newes, be so far generous as to acknowledge this his kindnesse, and doe not dishearten him in his endeavors, by making any doubt of the truth of his intelligence. For, to use a little protestation, I can assure you, there is not a line printed or proposed to your view, but carries the credit of other originalles, and justifies itself from honest and understanding authority; so that if they should faile there in true and exact discoveries, be not ye too malignant against the Printer here, that is so far from any invention of his owne, that when hee meets with improbability or absurdity, he leaves it quite out rather than startle your patience, or draw you into suspition of the verity of the whole, because some one passage may be untrue, or reiterates the second time.13
Either such men of principle were the exceptions or their protestations but paper thin. When the market for news was relatively unproductive, the printer often reworked older material, presenting it as contemporaneous. Furthermore, there was a general lack of editorial supervision even for what news was available. There was no great concern with the makeup of the coranto, and the printing was haphazard. Often the important news was buried within the trivial.14 Any accompanying commentary was shallow and commonplace.15 Moreover, the printer was laboring against imposing odds. His copy, the translated foreign news, essentially was rather boring. It recounted the activities of the world of the aristocrats, and the commoner never figured in the reports except en masse. If any domestic incidents were reported, they tended to be those “curious uncertainties” to which the government would not object—monsters, freaks, natural disturbances, miracles, visions, prodigies.16 Furthermore, the publishers usually were at the mercy of the integrity of their foreign correspondents and an unreliable postal system.
There is little wonder that the ethics and practices of the trade world furnished grist for Jonson’s satiric mill. Act III is filled with news topics which satirically set forth the falsity and the exaggeration in reporting with reports ranging from the King of Spain’s being chosen Pope and Emperor, to the discovery of an optic glass so powerful it could set ships afire by moonlight, to the sending of a mission of cooks to America to Christianize the cannibals. Other points satirized in Jonson’s comic description include practices of collecting, storing, and venting news as the occasion serves (I, ii, 26-27), selling positions as clerks or reporters for ready cash without consideration for the applicant’s qualifications (I, ii, 84-86), and dividing news into authentical or apocryphal categories with subdivisions such as vacation news, term news, reformed news, protestant news, and pontifical news (I, v, 1-15). News is packaged in gross amounts (ream, bale, ton) regardless of contents (I, v, 142-43); the source of news items is a breach of confidence (III, i, 34-39); and, above all, ethical standards are profaned for ready acquisition of money. Penniboy Canter, the disguised father who watches the operation of the staple, is led to exclaim that these newsmongers:
contemplate nothing
But the vile sordid things of time, place, money,
And let the noble, and the precious goe,
Vertue and honesty; hang ’hem; poore thinne membranes
Of honour; who respects them?
(III, ii, 242-46)
The topicality of this play is even more incisive than a general exposure of journalistic malpractices would suggest. Attempting to identify characters in Jonsonian drama is an extremely dangerous and often specious practice, one which Jonson had no sympathy with and warned against throughout his work. In The Magnetic Lady, for example, hunting for particular contemporary reference in a scene is compared to picking a lock rather than “opening it the faire way with a Key,” thus making a “Libell of [the poet’s] Comoedy” (Second Intermeane, 11-12, 28-29). Nevertheless, in some cases the evidence that he is using such contemporary figures, thereby heightening the comedy for a contemporary audience, is highly conclusive. We may consider, for example, the constant allusions which link the Infanta with the Spanish princess who had been the quest of Charles’ foolish courtship. Jonson named his lady Aurelia Clara Pecunia, the Infanta of the Mines, and, since the Infanta of Spain was named Isabella Clara Eugenia, it is natural to suspect that he was referring to Charles’ lost bride. Also, Jonson makes specific mention of the name of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador: “What newes of Gundomar? . . . For putting the poore English-play, was writ of him [A Game at Chess], to such a sordid vse” (III, ii, 207, 209-10). Two further references, these to contemporary journalists, seem to be obvious—Cymbal as Captain Gains-ford, though the captain was dead at the time of the play, and Nathaniel as Nathaniel Butter. There is the constant play upon the last name of the latter, a printer and bookseller of spotted reputation whose name appears on several of the early serials in 1622-1623. To a country woman who wishes to purchase a groatsworth of news, regardless of subject or authenticity, the register quips: “O! You are a Butterwoman, aske Nathaniel / The Clerke, there” (I, iv, 13-14). Cymbal refers to Butter’s tactics of reusing old news: “Nor shall the Stationer cheat vpon the Time, / By buttering ouer againe . . . his antiquated Pamphlets” (I, v, 58-59, 61). Lickfinger derogatorily compares buttered news to dross materials: “A rosted pound of butter, with grated bread in’t” (II, iii, 19). In the second intermeane (11. 50-69), the gossips develop at length an analogy between good news and properly churned, sweet butter. Further puns occur in the intermeane following act III: [Expec.]: “They [the various news reports] were as good, yet, as butter could make them! [Tattle]: In a word they were beastly buttered! he shall neuer come o’ my bread more. . . .” (11. 16-18); and finally in the description of the disappearance of the staple when Pecunia (money) departed: “I, and my fellow melted into butter, and spoyl’d our Inke, and so the Office vanish’d” (V, i, 49-50).
The other figure which can be identified with some degree of certainty is Cymbal, the Master of the Staple, as Captain Gainsford. Early editors and critics had assumed that the butter allusions, though loosely connected with a register of the staple, referred primarily to Butter as Cymbal.17 More recently, however, Gainsford, whose publisher was usually Nathaniel Butter, has been accepted as the more probable prototype of Jonson’s portrait.18 The register’s remark, “It is not now, as when the Captaine liu’d” (I, iv, 17), lends further credence to identifying the Master of the Staple as Gainsford, since Gainsford died of the plague in 1624, one year prior to the completion of the play. The reference, incidentally, is not a complimentary one; the countrywoman desiring a groatsworth of news is told that news is not so plentiful, so freely manufactured and vented, as it had been under the captain. Jonson passes judgment upon the quality of Gainsford’s work in two separate passages. In one, another possible reference to the captain’s death, he compares the news to the worthless drivel of aimless jeering: “our graue Gouernour [flew] / Into a subt’ler ayre; and is return’d / (As we doe heare) grand-Captaine of the Ieerers” (V, i, 46-48). Again there is the damning Biblical allusion which brands Cymbal and his workers as shallow, lacking in substance and worth:
Where else, as confident as sounding brasse,
Their tinckling Captaine, Cymbal, and the rest,
Dare put on any visor, to deride
The wretched. . . .
(V, vi, 7-10)
In the “Execration upon Vulcan,” Jonson counts the works of this scribbling captain among the rubbish which Vulcan had better devoured than the author’s manuscripts: “Captaine Pamp[h]lets horse, and foot, that sallie / Upon th’ Exchange, still, out of Popes-head-Alley” (11. 79-80). All told, it would appear that the captain was an acutal person and that he was dead by 1625, when The Staple of News was completed.19
But central to Jonson’s comic intent the satire cuts in both directions. The unethical standards of the trade and of certain of its practitioners exist only because the reading public is gullible. Old news, manufactured news—for comfort, for curiosity, for propaganda—can be had for the money. Though much of the news was slanted or written from an ulterior motivation, the idea of public news was still so delightfully novel to the reader that he was prone to take it uncritically as he found it. In effect, the staple is the worst of both miser and prodigal, for it is the concrete symbol of the perversion of values which can lead in either direction.
So created, the staple of news is a significant variation of the “magnetic field” of Jonson’s stage world. In earlier works he has set forth the royal court (Cynthia’s Revels), a sick bed (Volpone), Morose’s home (Epicoene), Lovewit’s home (The Alchemist), the fair (Bartholomew Fair) as locations which attract the characters of his playworld. Invariably, certain qualities or characteristics of this central device expose the folly and petty selfishness of the victims, as the deceptions and counterattacks of Volpone and Mosca reveal the vices of the sickroom’s visitors, as the sharpers and stooges of the fair reflect the gullibility, avariciousness, and hypocrisy of the fair’s customers. In each case the victim is gulled by his inability to perceive truth or reality amidst the tinsel of outwardly appealing falsity. In The Staple of News, while the staple scenes themselves do not constitute the main dramatic action, it is the staple which lures these characters together and exposes their vices and follies.
Perhaps the clearest indication that the gullibility of the reading public is basically under attack comes from Penniboy Junior in a remark to Fitton and Cymbal:
Why, me thinkes, Sir, if the honest common people
Will be abus’d, why should not they ha’ their pleasure,
In the belieuing Lyes are made for them;
As you i’ th’ Office, making them your selues?
(I, v, 42-45)
A register or reporter later compares this staple, which exploits the idle curiosity of the public, to the House of Fame, a Chaucerian device which exhibited various individuals torn by fanatic curiosity in a large house with several rooms where fact was variously interpreted, accepted, or rejected according to the individual will and understanding. Interestingly enough, when the staple explodes, it vanishes into thin air and vapor, just as Chaucer’s house stood in mid-air.
’Tis the house of fame, Sir,
Where both the curious, and the negligent;
The scrupulous or carelesse; wilde, and stay’d;
The idle, and laborious; all doe meet,
To tast the cornu copiae of her rumors,
Which she, the mother of sport, pleaseth to scatter
Among the vulgar: Baites, Sir, for the people!
And they will bite like fishes.
(III, ii, 115-22)
Jonson himself clearly indicates, in “To the Reader” preceding act III, that this is no reasonable man’s news. These follies of the age “could not be fitter reprehended, then in raising this ridiculous Office of the Staple, wherin the age may see her owne folly, or hunger and thirst after publish’d pamphlets of Newes, set out euery Saturday, but made all at home, & no syllable of truth in them” (11. 10-15). His point is virtually the same in the Prologue—“although our Title, Sir, be Newes, / Wee yet aduenture, here, to tell you none; / But shew you common follies” (Prologue for the Court, 11. 9-11).
It has been noted previously that Jonson in his “great comedies” maintains an effective comic tone by creating a situation intended not to bring the guller to moral or legal reprobation, but rather to subject the gull to satiric exposure because of the misuse of his native intelligence. Thus, for example, in The Alchemist derisive laughter is directed against the foolishness of Dapper, Drugger, Mammon, Tribulation, Ananias, and Kastril. Subtle, Face, and Dol are unpunished. Similarly, in Bartholomew Fair it is Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Waspe, Dame Purecraft, and Overdo who receive comic punishment, not the sharpers, the bawds, and the cutpurses to whom they fall victim. The situation in The Staple of News provides further illustration of the unchanging principles and purposes of Jonsonian comedy. The newsmongers of the playworld who perpetrate the unethical practices receive no punishment. Jonson removes the staple, when it has served its purpose, by a miraculous explosion caused by the departure of its prime motivator, money (Pecunia).20 Butter and the emissaries melt into vapor; Cymbal becomes grand Captain of the Jeerers. Jonson directs dramatic condemnation against Penniboy Junior, the prodigal, and Penniboy Senior, the miser, figures of the main plot. Such perverted intelligences enable hoaxes similar to the news staple, or at least the gross malpractice associated with it, to exist.
The elaborate machinery of the staple provides a comic mise en scene. The main theme comes directly from the native tradition of the morality play. There is no inversion of the morality pattern, as we have seen in The Devil Is an Ass, but instead a Jonsonian adaptation of the prodigal son story. The basis of the struggle between father and prodigal is social rather than spiritual; the soul is not at stake, but the mind and its rationale for a productive and harmonious life are. The theme is that moderation is the key, not to the kingdom of God, but to the kingdom of reason. And the dramatist is determined that we not miss the point of his adaptation—that we not assume his inventiveness has run dry and he is merely constructing a latter-day morality. To this end he uses three devices of his earlier comedies to guide his audience—the pointed, instructional prologue and epilogue, the additional machinery of the intercalary activity, and the character within the main plot who consciously serves as comic pointer. The prologue states that the work should instruct the spectator “and keepe your Acme in the state of truth,” and the epilogue reiterates the purpose of the “Makers double scope, / To profit and delight.” Jonson has not used such elaborate intercalary material since Every Man Out of His Humour (1599). The gossips Mirth, Tattle, Expectation, and Censure represent everything Jonson detests in an audience. Like the citizen and his wife in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, they insist on sitting upon the stage to be seen and “to arraign” both actor and poet. Completely oblivious to the didactic possibilities of drama, they complain about their children being forced to act in the grammar schools. They brand the plot intolerably dull, with Tattle pompously proclaiming the catastrophe worst of all. In actuality the catastrophe has not even occurred yet, and her comment mistakenly refers to the catastasis, the sudden turn of events at the end of act IV. But, then, as Jonson implies, one does not have to understand in order to damn! The gossips quibble about the play’s lack of a fool and a devil, a fiend to carry away the vice, a wooden dagger for the vice to flourish. Through their commentary following each act the poet implies the too frequent practice of denouncing the writer for faults which actually belong to the imperceptive spectator. Even so, despite the general fatuousness, Mirth delivers a telling comment in replying to Tattle’s charges that the morality characters are not what they used to be: “That was the old way. . . . [N]ow they are attir’d like men and women o’ the time, the Vices, male and female! Prodigality like a young heyre, and his Mistresse Money, (whose fauours he scatters like counters), prank’t up like a prime Lady, the Infanta of the Mines” (Second Intermeane, 11. 14-20).
Of greater integral significance to the plot is the use of Penniboy Canter’s remarks throughout the action as the first clear comic pointer since Horace of The Poetaster (1601). The disguised father, standing aloof from the vices of the playworld, comments upon the sordid and petty aspirations of others. On two occasions he denounces the pretentious hypocrisy and gullibility of a public which would accept the products of the staple. While at the office in conversation with Cymbal, he is overcome with “just anger”:
. . . Who can endure to see
The fury of mens gullets, and their groines?
. . . They couet things—
Superfluous still; when it were much more honour
They could want necessary! . . .
Your brauery was but showen, ’twas not possest:
While it did boast it seife, it was then perishing.
(III, iv, 45-46, 50-52, 63-64)
Again in the Apollo room of the Devil Tavern, Penniboy Canter issues an even more scathing denunciation of the money-mad society and those who cozen it.
. . . All things within, without ’hem,
Moue, but their braine, and that stands still! mere monsters.
.....
These are the gallant spirits o’ the age,
The miracles o’ the time! That can cry vp
And downe mens wits! and set what rate on things
Their half-brain’d fancies please!
(IV, ii, 136-37, 140-44)
At the news staple Canter excoriates Cymbal for his lavish courtship of Pecunia:
Why, that’s the end of wealth! thrust riches outward,
And remaine beggars within: contemplate nothing
But the vile sordid things of time, place, money,
And let the noble, and the precious goe.
(III, ii, 241-44)
When Penniboy Junior reaches the nadir of prodigality in act IV through participation in the activities of the jeerers (whose badinage reflects perversions moral, social, and ethical), Canter lashes out against the hypocrites of various trades with a diatribe of Juvenalesque proportions:
And your selfe [Madrigal] a Foole
O’ the first ranke, and one shall haue the leading
O’ the right-hand file, vnder this braue Commander.
.....
Sir, I say this is
A very wholesome exercise, and comely.
Like Lepers, shewing one another their scabs,
Or flies feeding on vlcers.
(IV, i, 30-36)
After exposing each jeerer as a canter in his own profession (the herald, the doctor, the military captain, the poet, the courtier-projector, the academician), he casts off the beggar’s cloak and sarcastically proclaims his true identity:
Your worships louing, and obedient father,
Your painefull Steward, and lost Officer!
Who haue done this, to try how you would vse
Pecunia, when you had her. . . .
And dost thou prostitute,
Scatter thy Mistresse fauours, throw away
Her bounties, as they were red-burning coales.
(IV, iv, 117-20, 130-32)
Clearly, he condemns not the professions but these false practitioners who are the “scumme and excrements of men,” saying “For these shall neuer haue that plea ’gainst me, / Or colour of aduantage, that I hate / Their callings, but their manners, and their vices” (IV, iv, 137-39). Finally in the closing scene Canter states to Senior the theme of the drama, applicable both to prodigal and miser, that “the vse of things is all, and not the Store” (V, vi, 26).
By use of such devices—the prologue, the intercalary comments, the comic pointer—Jonson directs the spectator’s attention to the proper perspective for his narrative of the prodigal son, in itself a simple variation of the morality pattern. Penniboy Junior is a mankind figure who must make the conscious choice of one way of life or another. Penniboy Senior, unable to evaluate material possession properly, represents the force of evil or intellectual mismanagement which distorts the healthy spirit or mind. Though Junior never comes under the direct control of Senior, for a time he is influenced by a similar force in the guise of the jeerers and the figures of the staple. On the contrary, Penniboy Canter, through his sound advice to Junior and his constant exposure of vice and ignorance in any form, represents the positive, normal scale of values in which money is a means, not an end in itself. In effect, the controlling theme of Aristotelian moderation is centered in Penniboy Junior’s courtship of Lady Pecunia and his reactions to the standards of Penniboy Senior and Penniboy Canter. The theme, in turn, radiates outward through the lack of professional ethics among the newsmongers at the staple and the lack of commonsense among the gossips who chatter between the scenes.
In The Staple of News, as in The Devil Is an Ass, Jonson has adapted the morality play to the purposes of satiric comedy. Like Fitzdottrel, Penniboy Junior stands to lose not his soul but the rational mind which must guide man if he is not to be consumed by his own desires or destroyed by the unscrupulousness of his neighbors. Penniboy Junior is constantly in a dilemma caused by, on the one hand, the advice of the disguised father who encourages him to recognize the essential truth of moderation concerning money values and, on the other hand, the social pressure of various forms of materialistic perversion. The father’s disguise is Junior’s first major test, for the father represents wisdom appareled in rags. Also, he is constant in his sound advice to Junior and in his scathing condemnation of all who deviate from the sane, reasoned, intelligent activities. Indeed, his first words to his son warn of false creditors, evil companionship, and useless expenditure. He is quick to warn against servile devotion to Pecunia, berating those who “make corpulent curt’sies to her, till they cracke for ’t” (I, vi, 73). He later admonishes Junior for taking her to an alley cook shop (i.e., for not treating her with proper care and concern: II, v, 115 ff.) and for vain self-praise (III, ii, 12). At the staple he is courageous in confronting the jeerers, labeling them “fooles of the first ranke” and “half brained”:
Look, look, how all their eyes
Dance i’ their heads, (obserue) scatter’d with lust!
At sight o’ their braue Idoll.
.....
All things within, without ’hem,
Moue, but their braine, and that stands still! mere monsters.
(IV, ii, 130-32, 136-37)
One by one he exposes the falsity of the jeerers, finally disclosing his true identity.
It is subtly ironic that Canter, the figure of the golden mean, should become the victim of a plot in act V and be saved by the son he has denounced. The action is significant, however, in a morality concerned with social values. Conscience and moral obligation may guide the appetitive soul, as Canter directs Junior through his numerous pronouncements and evaluations, but the motivation for regeneration (in this case, the establishment of a sound rationale) must come from the will, from Junior. As the recipient of Canter’s discipline, he must decide to act in accordance with it. Hence, Junior’s decision to rescue his father, in spite of the humiliation which his father has dealt him, represents the initial action toward healthy mental development taken by the individual who reacts positively to sound advice. Like Fitzdottrel in The Devil Is an Ass, Junior experiences a social transformation which produces a new relationship with Pecunia equally as significant as the new relationship between Fitzdottrel and his wife. In both instances the association has been threatened by the gull’s determination to misuse the material value which the mate represents, and in each case the true value of love—and money—is realized only following his comic catharsis. The final lines in The Staple of News, spoken by Lady Pecunia, articulate the morality pattern and the lesson which must be mastered for a successful life:
And so Pecunia her seife doth wish,
That shee may still be ayde vnto their vses,
Not slaue vnto their pleasures, or a Tyrant
Ouer their faire desires; but teach them all
The golden meane.
(V, vi, 60-64)
Jonson broadens the scope of his didactic theme by redeeming both characters who depart from this golden mean. In addition to the repentance and restriction of Penniboy Junior, Penniboy Senior experiences a change of heart following his derisive exposure. Again Canter is the source of this exposure.
Superstition
Doth violate the Deity it worships:
No lesse then scorne doth. And beleeue it, brother,
The vse of things is all, and not the Store.
(V, vi, 23-26)
Realizing from the activities of the jeerers that his former companions are “a poore affrighted, / And guilty race of men, that dare to stand / No breath of truth,” Senior thanks his brother “for the light you haue giuen me,” frees his dogs, restores Pecunia’s servants to their mistress, and bequeaths to his nephew “my house, goods, lands, all but my vices,” which he goes to cleanse. To offset the obtrusive didacticism in this material, Jonson is working for a comic approach. Senior, in abject depression after Pecunia’s departure, places his dogs on trial as abettors of her escape, and the monologue of the mock court, after opening with a few near-pathetic remarks, degenerates into farcical bawdiness. Interspersed in the trial scene is the absurd logic which Senior aplies to the porter’s hypothetical cumulative expenditure for canary sack. The unfortunate porter, who has drunk his annual draught at the cost of “sixpence in seven years,” is lambasted by the miser for spending at so rapid a rate:
Six-pence in seuen yeere (vse vpon vse)
Growes in that first seuen yeere to be a twelue-pence.
That, in the next, two-shillings; the third foure-shillings;
The fourth seuen yeere, eight-shillings; the fifth, sixteen:
.....
This thou art fall’n from, by thy riot!
Shoulds’t thou liue seuenty yeeres, by spending six-pence.
.....
There is a Summe that number cannot reach!
(V, iv, 20-23, 27-28, 30)
Next, Penniboy Senior is subjected to the ribaldry of the jeerers—Cymbal, Fitton, Shunfield, Almanach, and Madrigal. They come to “baile your dogs,” to let him “be fairly knock’d o’ the head / With a good Ieere or two.” After subjecting him to a session of name calling, they are routed by Old Canter “and his forces,” and what could have been a tedious conversion scene is avoided.
Jonson in this play as in its predecessor is drawing upon elements of the older dramatic tradition to convey his theme of the wisdom of discipline as opposed to the foolishness of prodigality. The probing, reshaping, and experimenting in this adaptation deserves more than the label of “dotage.”21 Even if the result is no longer the sparkling wit of Jonson’s middle-period plays, the comic intent is equally stable. We have seen that the depiction of the son’s profligacy, not in terms of spiritual degeneracy, but in terms of his lack of intellectual discipline, makes the story more compatible with comic treatment. We have also noted how Jonson enhances the comic potential of his material by using a comic pointer to comment upon the action and to direct the laughter of the spectator. The father in disguise as a beggar-guide-companion to his son is a feature not found in any previous dramatic treatment of the prodigal son theme.
There is further significant evidence that Jonson wanted to maintain the level of broad comedy. The modifications of the prodigal son story provide a richness of dramatic irony. The father, believed dead, overhears his son’s remarks concerning him and his money. The father’s later denunciation of the son, which leads to Junior’s repentance, is the end result of information Canter gains through his comic disguise. For another, the “dead” father is in itself a curious turn; in the Biblical parable it is the son who twice is referred to as dead by the father: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again.” Furthermore, Jonson’s treatment of the older brother is an interesting innovation. Like Thomas Ingelend in The Disobedient Child,22 Jonson has eliminated this character, who might introduce the serious edge of fraternal jealousy upon his comic pattern. In another sense, he has replaced the elder brother with the equally derisive extreme of prodigality, the miserliness of Penniboy Senior. Finally, the adaptation of the story of the prodigal son to the pattern of classical five-act structure, described in the summary of the plot at the beginning of the chapter, allows Jonson to insert the fifth-act incident in which the repentant son rescues the father from potential financial disaster and in which the would-be guller is countertricked. Thus, the dramatist creates once again the comic situation in which the gull brings destruction upon his own head.
Two of these modifications—the dramatic irony and the material of the catastrophe—merit closer attention. With the “deceased” father overhearing the son’s disrespectful remarks, Jonson devises a comic method of revealing Junior’s utter lack of maturity and self-discipline. When Canter brings news of the father’s death, there is ironic wordplay on founder, used by Junior to label one who founded him by bringing news of his inheritance, but recognized as literally accurate by both Canter and the spectator (founder as father). The pun serves the double purpose of directing derisive laughter upon Penniboy Junior while also reflecting his absorption in material values: “This is my Founder, this same learned Canter! / He brought me the first newes of my fathers death, / I thanke him, and euer since, I call him Founder” (I, iii, 18-20). At this point the spectator has been sufficiently prompted concerning Canter’s true identity by the stranger’s sudden appearance with the news of the father’s death, by the comment of Junior quoted above, and by Canter’s constant and unflagging fatherly advice. Indeed, Canter’s first words to Junior constitute an open warning against prodigality and the dangers of evil companionship:
I do not like those paper-squibs, good Master.
They may vndoe your store, I meane, of Credit,
And fire your Arsenall . . . [unless you take care]
To beat these Pyoners off, that carry a Mine
Would blow you vp, at last.
(I, iii, 25-27, 30-31)
Perhaps the most intense use of comic dramatic irony occurs in the closing scene of the first act when Canter, on stage, is directly exposed to Junior’s conversation with Picklock concerning the timely and thoughtful death of his father:
I should ha’ made shift
To haue laught as heartily in my mourners hood,
As in this Suite, if it had pleas’d my father
To haue beene buried, with the Trumpeters.
......
A louing and obedient father of him,
I know it (,I): a right, kinde-natur’d man,
To dye so opportunely.
......
I will not wish him aliue, againe; not I,
For all my Fortune.
(I, vi, 6-9, 14-16, 22-23)
Again in the following act Canter remarks, in a comment sharply ironic to the spectator who realizes the true situation: “I owe my happinesse to him, / The waiting on his worship, since I brought him / The happy Newes, welcome to all young heires” (II, v, 37-39). As the plot develops, comic dramatic irony colors and enriches the commentary of Penniboy Canter in his role as comic pointer.
The addition to the catastrophe of an incident in which the son verifies his repentance by rescuing the father gives both comic intensification and substance to an otherwise anticlimactic story. It would seem at the end of act IV that the father has successfully humiliated the son into abject repentance. The staple has quite dissolved at Pecunia’s departure. But this apparent resolution is abruptly overturned by the catastasis involving Picklock’s false trust. Picklock wryly announces to Junior that his father’s estate is still available: “Sir, I had somewhat, will keepe you still Lord / Of all the estate, (if I be honest) as / I hope I shall” (V, i, 79-81). The dramatist, careful to avoid any sympathy from the audience for this scheme against the father, presents Picklock’s true intention through a soliloquy a few lines later:
If I can now commit Father and Sonne,
And make my profits out of both. Commence
A suite with the old man, for his whole state,
And goe to Law with the Sonnes credit, vndoe
Both, both with their owne money. . . .
(V, i, 99-103)
Thus, the reversal has developed, and both father and son are to be victimized by Picklock as he plays off one character against the other. This hypocritical schemer becomes a new guller to bear the brunt of later comic derision, now that Junior will prove to be converted to right reason.
Unless Dryden’s label of “dotage” refers to an overabundance of ingenious plotting, the manner in which Jonson motivates Picklock’s downfall should again give pause to those who assert that the dramatist is in his senility. As usual with Jonson, the gull ties the noose around his own neck. In like fashion Volpone has placed himself at the mercy of Mosca by bruiting the report of his own death; Zeal-of-the-Land Busy has exposed himself to the crowd’s ire by attempting to overthrow the puppet show; Meercraft has revealed his mercenary plot to Fitzdottrel when he persuades Fitzdottrel to feign madness. Similarly, Picklock risks the trust in the hands of Lickfinger, the “Master-Cook and Parcel-Poet.” Lickfinger, in turn, falls prey to Junior’s countertrick of a false messenger who requests the trust at “Picklock’s command.” Finally, Picklock is foiled by Juniors’ revelation to his father of the plot against him, Thomas the barber’s eavesdropping as Picklock reveals the plot to Junior, and Junior’s false messenger. Again we have the familiar pattern of evil redounding upon its own head, the situation in this play actually being more ingenious than in the master comedies.
Moreover, Picklock’s function in the final act is not without its symbolic significance. Essentially, the play is concerned with good versus evil, the first four acts producing a playworld in which vice (Junior, Senior, Cymbal) reigns in gallant dress while virtue (Canter) goes in rags and tatters. The false resolution in act IV seems to set the world aright; virtue is no longer in rags. Yet, only a portion of the evil has been corrected. Visible features of prodigality and parsimony have been checked, but an invisible form which assumes no single physical shape, hypocrisy, is cloaked beneath surface dignity and honest appearance. This, the most powerful form of evil because there is no defense against it, is here portrayed by Picklock, and it threatens to engulf both virtue (Canter) and repentant prodigality (Junior). This contest furnishes the catastrophe of the play.
But the play, even in this action, is still comedy, and Jonson is careful to emphasize this through situation and wordplay. An example is the comic shift in Picklock’s fifth-act exposure. Junior reveals Picklock’s plot to his father in the face of the plotter. Picklock immediately denies and berates the charge:
I must haue witnes.
Where is your witnes? you can produce witnes?
.......
No Court
Grants out a Writ of Summons, for the Conscience,
That I know, nor Sub-poena, nor Attachment.
I must haue witnesse, and of your producing,
Ere this can come to hearing, and it must
Be heard on oath, and witnesse.
(V, ii, 57-58, 62-67)
In the face of such numerous allusions to a witness which the glib Picklock is certain Junior cannot produce, Thomas steps from behind the hangings, and the startled Picklock can only exclaim, “a rat behind the hangings.” Even so, Picklock regains his composure with the assurance that he possesses the valuable document, the false trust, and swears to “proue yours maintainence, and combination, / And sue you all” (V, ii, 92-93). Suddenly this world, too, crashes around him as he discovers the plot of the false messenger. But, again, the comic level is maintained through the rhetorical virtuosity of the condemned. Much like Volpone’s final line as he is being dragged from the stage, “This is called the mortifying of the Fox” (V, xii, 125), Picklock, exposed on all sides, retorts:
I am lost! a plot! I scent it!
......
Plague o’ your trust.
I am truss’d vp among you.
......
In mine owne halter, I haue made the Noose.
(V, iii, 12, 14-15, 16)
The theme of the golden mean runs through the story of the prodigal and the miser, the diseased appetite for news and the unprincipled newsmongers it has occasioned, the gossips on stage who are the ironic counterparts of the judicious spectators able to weigh all in the total context. Jonson’s care with the plot is evident in the way this theme of moderation radiates to the minor characters. In each instance the character (Madrigal, the poetaster; Piedmantle, the heraldet; Almanach, the doctor; the captain; the courtier) has prostrated himself before the superficial qualities of his profession—in the jargon he spouts, the money he worships, and the fame he fawningly courts. Madrigal, for instance, though he is “the hope of Helicon,” has long since played the prodigal with his talents. When he recites, Old Nurse Mortgage snores, Statute falls fast asleep, and Mistress Band nods in her chair (II, iv, 135ff.). The poetaster delivers his inane verse in the Devil Tavern, often requiring a line from one of the guests to complete his verse. He receives the misdirected praise of Penniboy Junior:
Hope of Parnassus!
Thy Iuy shall not wither, nor thy Bayes;
Thou shalt be had into her Graces Cellar,
And there know Sacke, and Claret, all December.
(IV, ii, 175-78)
Canter, on the other hand, whose name (so this poetaster finds) ironically denotes the ability to expose canting in others, attacks Madrigal without mercy.
My Eg-chind Laureat, here, when he comes forth
With Dimeters, and Trimeters, Tetrameters,
Pentameters, Hexameters, Catalecticks,
His Hyper and his Brachy-Catalecticks,
His Pyrrhicks, Epitrites, and Choriambicks,
What is all this, but canting?
(IV, iv, 54-59)
Jonson further contrasts the true poet with the poetaster Madrigal through Lickfinger’s equation of cooking and poetizing.23 The “master-cook and parcel-poet”
holds no man can be a Poet,
That is not a good Cooke . . .
[who] drawes all Arts
Out of the Kitchin, but the Art of Poetry,
Which he concludes the same with Cookery.
(III, iii, 21-25)
Lickfinger charges that Madrigal is “for the vaine Oracle of the Botle. / The hogshead Trismegistus, is thy Pegasus.” Insinuating that Madrigal lacks proper intelligence, discipline, and exercise of talent, the cook by analogy to his “profession” describes the intensive training, the adaptation to the times, the breadth of vision necessary to the true poet:
A Master-Cooke! Why, he’s the man o’ men,
For a Professor! He designes, he drawes,
He paints, he carues, he builds, he fortifies.
......
He raiseth Ramparts of immortali crust;
And teacheth all the Tacticks, at one dinner:
. . . Then he knowes
The influence of the Starres vpon his meats,
And all their seasons, tempers, qualities,
And so to fit his relishes, and sauces.
......
He is an Architect, an Inginer,
A Souldiour, a Physician, a Philosopher,
A generall Mathematician.24
(IV, ii, 19-21, 26-27, 29-32, 35-37)
Penniboy Canter makes clear in the exposure scene in the fourth act that his complaint is not against the professions themselves, but against those, “the scumme and excrements of men,” who hypocritically engage in a profession to further their own interests by preying upon those around them:
If thou had’st sought out good, and vertuous persons
Of these professions: I’had lou’d thee, and them.
. . . [for I hate not]
Their callings, but their manners, and their vices.
(IV, iv, 135-36, 139)
For another example of prodigality in the minor characters, Piedmantle, who has drawn a pedigree for her Grace Pecunia, tracing her ancestry back to the very creation of man, is Jonson’s satiric portrayal of the proud, boastful, specious quality of many who have business with the Heralds’ College. “The name ‘Piedmantel’ itself is drawn from the College and betokens a pursuivant, a functionary who ranks below the herald.”25 To the heraldet’s recitation of Pecunia’s ancestry, Canter retorts: “[I]s not this canting? Do you vnderstand him?” (IV, iv, 27). Junior admits he cannot—but “It sounds well, and the whole thing / Is rarely painted: I will haue such a scrowle, / What ere it cost me” (IV, iv, 27-30).
Similarly, Canter criticizes the doctor for prostrating his skills by dabbling in astrological lore:
I lou’d you
Whil[e] you did hold your practice. . . .
but since your thombes
Haue greas’d the Ephemerides . . .
And your twelue houses in the Zodiacke: . . .
Troth, you shall cant alone for Peny-boy.
(II, iv, 71-72, 73-74, 76, 78)
And later the physician is described as a canter of the worst sort:
When he discourseth of dissection,
......
Of Vena caua, and of vena porta,
.....
What does hee else but cant? Or if he runne
To his Iudiciall Astrologie,
And trowle the Trine, the Quartile, and the Sextile,
.......
Does not he cant?
(IV, iv, 38, 40, 42-44, 47)
Obviously, the source of much of the comedy in this material rests in the language used by the characters. There is a golden mean in language as in conduct, and Jonson firmly believes that ignorance and folly reveal themselves in the quality of man’s speech. “[S]peake that I may see thee. . . . No glasse renders a mans forme, or likenesse, so true as his speech” (Discoveries, 11. 2031, 2033-35). As some men are tall and impressive, so some language is high and great. As some men are dwarfish and insignificant, some language is poor and flat. Usage determines the form, and the reasonable man must accommodate himself to this standard of propriety.
Custome is the most certaine Mistresse of Language, as the publicke stampe makes the current money. But wee must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coyning. Nor fetch words with the extreme and utmost ages; since the chiefe vertue of a style is perspicuitie, and nothing so vitious in it, as to need an Interpreter. . . . Letters are, as it were, the Banke of words, and restore themselves to an Author, as the pawnes of Language. But talking and Eloquence are not the same: to speake and to speake well, are two things. A foole may talke, but a wise man speakes, and out of the observation, knowledge, and use of things.
(Discoveries, 11. 1926-31, 1863-68)
The façade of technical jargon and mysterious terminology—whether in the alchemist, the projector, the astrologer, the physician, the cleric, or the social ape with his affected phrase-dropping—is clear revelation of the mental perversion which degrades society into a human jungle in which guller preys upon gull.
Jonson’s comic intent here is the same as in his major plays. Departure from the golden mean of human conduct (as in those figures of incidental satire, as in the prodigal and the miser, as in the staple and its attendants) can lead only to the destruction of person and reputation. The manifest transparency of the devices which enable Jonson to control the spectator’s reaction to the comedy—the prologue, the epilogue, the intercalary material, the comic pointer, and the allegorical figures of the main plot—has largely been responsible for the various charges of artistic debilitation. But there is no less concern than in the greater comedies for the construction of the piece and for the proper function of comedy. Like The Devil Is an Ass, The Staple of News draws upon the older dramatic tradition to delineate the follies of the moment. Through reshaping of a Biblical allegory for the purposes of comedy and delineation of a news staple concerned with profit at the expense of integrity, Jonson attacks the sham, the hypocritical, the perverse, the malignant, and the undisciplined by exposure to the light of comic ridicule through man’s affectations.