The New Inn, Jonson’s only play to appear in octavo form (1631), was not published in the Second Folio of 1640-1641, but it did appear in all subsequent editions.1 The dating of the lone performance depends on Edmund Malone’s report of an entry in the lost Office Book of the Master of the Revels, stating that the play was licensed on January 19, 1629, by Sir Henry Herbert, and on the assumption that this was the day of the performance.2 The single production was an utter fiasco, as affirmed by the later “Dedication to the Reader” and Jonson’s cryptic title page: “The / New Inne. / Or, / The Light Heart. / A Comoedy. / As it was neuer acted, but most / negligently play’d by some, / the Kings Seruants. / And more squeamishly beheld, and censured by others, the Kings Subjects. / 1629. / Now, at last, set at liberty to the Readers, his Maties / Seruants, and Subjects, to be judg’d. / 1631. / By the Author, B. Jonson.” A Second Epilogue had been prepared for court the following night, but the performance was canceled after the dismal opening at Blackfriars, and it was never needed. The evidence is clear that Jonson was bitterly disappointed and had anticipated a better reception for the play. Confined to his bed by a second stroke, he assailed the audience with his customary arrogance in the “Ode to Himself”:
Come leaue the lothed stage,
And the more lothsome age:
Where pride, and impudence (in faction knit)
Vsurpe the chair of wit!
Indicting, and arraigning euery day
Something they call a Play.
(11. 1-6)3
The poem evidently accomplished his purpose. Not only did it proclaim the author’s scorn for popular praise, but it also provoked a minor literary skirmish, with reactions ranging from the sarcasm of Owen Feltham’s “Answer to the Ode” and the anonymous “The Country’s Censure on Ben Jonson’s The New Inn” to the sympathy of Thomas Carew’s “To Ben Jonson,” John Cleveland’s “Ode to Ben Jonson,” and the anonymous “To the Author on his Unfortunate Mother.”4
The plot of the play is quite elaborate, but the central idea can be easily stated. Lady Frampul, wishing to establish a court of love for an evening’s entertainment at the inn she is visiting, requests that Lovel, one of her former suitors, be charged with disrespect and be required to define and defend true love in a formal session of the court. The protasis, acts I and II, establishes the situation for this court. Goodstock, the host of the Light Heart Inn and an observer of mankind, attempts to cheer up Lovel, a melancholy aristocrat who has just arrived. The host introduces Lovel to his adopted son Frank and, while discussing the child’s education, humorously censures the royal court for its decadence and its practice of training the young to be hypocritical and pretentious. When Lady Frampul arrives with her attendants, including Lord Beaufort and Lord Latimer, Lovel immediately prepares to leave, but Goodstock persuades him to stay. The melancholy lord informs the host, who in reality is Lady Frampul’s father, that her parents separated years ago, the wife leaving home with her younger daughter, the father leaving shortly thereafter in search of his wife, and the estate descending to this older daughter, Lady Frampul. Apparently, Lady Frampul is highly delighted with social frivolities and masculine attention. Once settled at the inn, she declares her chambermaid Prudence as sovereign for a day in a court of love to be held in the inn, and she disguises Frank as a flamboyant young kinswoman “Laetitia.” Lovel, as defendant, is charged with disrespect to Lady Frampul and is assigned two hours of penance, each to be rewarded by a kiss from the “she-sun.” It is determined that Lovel in the first hour shall undertake a definition and defense of true love. As this action is planned, minor characters, among them Fly (the parasite of the inn) and Sir Glorious Tipto (a miles gloriosus attendant upon Lady Frampul), engage in a rowdy drinking bout in the basement of the inn.
Acts III and IV, the epitasis, are concerned essentially with Lovel’s two-hour penance and the court of love proceedings. During the first hour he defends love through a formal proclamation of platonic idealism. Meanwhile, his friend Beaufort, overcome with desire for Lady Frampul’s “kinswoman,” constantly interrupts with pointed remarks about his passion for Laetitia and his desire, not for a platonic relationship, but for immediate sensual gratification. In the second hour’s penance Lady Frampul changes Lovel’s topic from a defense of love to a defense of valor. Lovel carries off this new project well, until a sulking fit following the court session contradicts his claims of true fortitude. All through these proceedings the antics of the servants below the stairs mockingly reflect aspects of the action above. For example, while the artificial court is being established above, with the servant Prue commanding Mistress Frampul, Tipto, a vainglorious braggart, is holding court below and arranging the household staff in military order. In the following act during Lovel’s noble assertions above the stairs concerning valor, a comic parody is enacted below. Tipto argues with Huffle loudly, lengthily, and boastfully, yet runs ingloriously from actual battle after goading his opponent with words and threats.
In act V, the catastrophe, Fly informs the host that Lord Beaufort is married privately to the supposed lady (Laetitia), Goodstock’s son. Goodstock, sensing a hilarious confusion of sex, receives the news as an omen of mirth, but complains that Lovel is gone to bed melancholic. Meanwhile, two new characters, the tailor Nick Stuff and his wife Pinnacia, appear at the inn, never expecting to meet their customers there. Pinnacia, pretentiously, is wearing the new dress which her husband has made for Prue as the queen. The enraged Lady Frampul hastily takes the dress from the crestfallen couple and commands Prue to don the outfit. In new apparel Prue is instructed to recapture Lovel’s good wishes for her mistress. The piece concludes with a frenzied succession of events. The host tells Lady Frampul of Beaufort’s marriage. Beaufort enters, confesses, and calls for his bed and bride-bowl to be made ready. The host forbids this, informing Beaufort he has married a boy. Suddenly an old “nurse” rushes frantically into the room, screaming that her daughter has been undone. Frank (Laetitia) is revealed to be Goodstock’s younger daughter, the nurse is Goodstock’s wife, and Goodstock himself is Lord Frampul. Finding his daughters, the host immediately bestows one on Lovel and the other on Beaufort. Prue is taken by Lord Latimer as his wife; Fly is given the inn, and all are contented.
While there are numerous incidental sources for the play, Jonson devised both the involved complications of an entire family separated and miraculously reunited and the narrative framework within which the philosophic concepts of love and valor are placed.
Posterity, though, has not been gracious. Spectators the first night were unimpressed, and subsequent critics have proved no less severe. Though all Jonson’s “dotages” have had a poor reception, condemnation of this play has been especially avid. The Yale editor caustically remarks, “No one who has read The New Inn will doubt that it was damned—or if it were not, that it deserved to be—for as a piece of dramatic construction it is almost without virtue. . . . Nearly three hundred years have elapsed since the ‘hundred fastidious impertinents’ passed judgment on The New Inn as a dramatic performance, and in these succeeding centuries no voice has been heard to dispute the justice of their sentence.”5 The plot, with its “accumulating and culminating absurdities of action and catastrophe,”6 is “so preposterous that one shrinks from contemplating what the strokes had cost Jonson.”7 The editor asserts that the dramatist has futilely attempted to merge the incongruous elements of humour comedy and the fanciful Arcadian romance of multiple disguises and cross-love motifs “whose end is to make marriages, not expose folly and vice.”8 Finally, Jonson is said to have laid aside his satiric weapons;9 having grown “more inward and familiar with existence, . . . he would love it more and reform it less.”10
These evaluations assume a qualitative change in Jonson’s comic intent which he was unable to execute successfully. More precisely, they assume he attempted to achieve the tolerant laughter of romantic comedy rather than the derisive laughter of realistic comedy. However, a serious consideration of the play will not support such an assumption. Branding the play a “dotage” because it is senile romantic escapism lacking the barbs of Jonson’s earlier work is like condemning Dean Swift for cannibalism in A Modest Proposal. The New Inn is nothing if it is not irony. What appears at first glance to be straitlaced romantic comedy which fails to come off as the result of a “preposterous plot” becomes on second glance a flagrant exaggeration of virtually every device sacred to the writers of romances, which Jonson always had considered a degradation of the dramatic art. What may appear to be rather tedious, undramatic orations on love and valor with only the most tenuous connections with the rest of the plot become upon close examination a parody of platonic love and senecan valor which derisively exposes the specious “cult of love” resurrected at the English court by Queen Henrietta Maria. The purity of platonic love set against the façade of contemporary social convention emphasizes the dross qualities of love ritualized and codified into a cult which actually was an excuse for immorality and sexual promiscuity. Just as base passion can hide behind the terminology of true love, so cowardice can mask itself in the verbiage of valor and courage. All things considered, Jonson’s comic intent (his desire to “strip the ragged follies of the time . . . with a whip of steel,” to “fright our pride and laugh our folly hence,” to “mix with you in industry to please . . . such as will but join their profit with their pleasure”) is quite consistent with that of his major comedies in purpose and in scale of values. His purpose in this play as elsewhere is to expose to corrective laughter hypocrisy and pretension in whatever form they may assume.
To defend Jonson’s satiric intentions the second glance is necessary. But a more plausible explanation than the assumption that his “tenacity and execution deserted him”11 is that he felt it wise to veil his attack upon corruption within the court. In Cynthia’s Revels and numerous masques he had found this more effective and safer than overt ridicule as in Eastward Ho and, probably, The Isle of Dogs. Likely, the popular audience of the opening night would miss much that would be meaningful to a courtly audience. The Second Epilogue, written for a scheduled court performance which was canceled after the fiasco at Blackfriars, states specifically the object of the drama:
To giue the King, and Queene, and Court delight:
But, then, we meane, the Court aboue the stayres,
And past the guard; men that haue more of eares,
Than eyes to iudge vs.
(11. 4-7)
Jonson was later convinced that the play was not properly understood and was damned without justification. In the “Dedication to the Reader” he claims the audience was guilty of “not vnderstanding one Scene.” He addresses himself optimistically to the reader, writing, “there is more hope of thee, then of a hundred fastidious impertinents, who were there present the first day, yet neuer made piece of their prospect the right way.” Again, in the “Ode to Himself,” written to convey his “iust indignation” for the vulgar censure of his play, he sharply assails the ignorant onlookers:
’Twere simple fury, still, thy seife to waste
On such as haue no taste!
To offer them a surfet of pure bread,
Whose appetites are dead!
(11. 9-12)
By 1629, the year The New Inn was produced at Black-friars, a cult of platonic love was in full swing in the English court, and it held sway until the civil wars and even into the Restoration. The cult had its beginnings in England in 1627 with Henrietta Maria, who was intent upon purifying morals and manners and who encouraged romantic ideas of love and marriage through court masques and plays. The immediate origins of the queen’s platonic coterie can be found in the French court, where she was influenced by the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a clique sponsored by Catherine de Vivonne and dependent upon D’Urfé’s L’Astrée for its tenets of love and beauty. This lengthy novel or pastoral romance first appeared in English translation in 1620, after having been popular in France for some years before. A concoction of ideas from medieval chivalry, Petrarchan sonnets, Italian pastorals, Spanish romances, and French poetry, L’Astrée was a ready handbook for Henrietta’s cult. From the famous thirty-one rules of courtly love set down in the late twelfth century by Andreas in the court of Marie de Champagne, G. F. Sensabaugh12 listed the basic tenets of this seventeenth-century counterpart: Fate rules all lovers. Beauty and goodness are one and the same. The beautiful woman is a saint to be worshipped; though she be scornful, the humble suitor is expected to give constant service and devotion to his “she-sun.” True love is of equal hearts and divine. Love is all-important and all-powerful. True love is more important than marriage. True love is the sole guide to virtue. Also, true love allows any liberty of action and thought. Under this doctrine an all-powerful passion and the vow of love became sacred and inviolable.
Previous critics of the play have seen a relationship between the court of Jonson’s play and that of Henrietta Maria, but they have nearly always failed to perceive that Jonson is not merely reflecting a contemporary fashion, but setting it within satiric context.13 One reads, for example, of “the strong platonic influence” or “the beautiful orations in praise of platonic love,” and of Lovel as “a complete gentleman and scholar,” “a chivalric and poetic lover.” Yet when one considers Henrietta’s cult in the light of Jonson’s ars poetica, the poet’s disapproval of such a system of thought is almost inevitable. For, although it might have been the queen’s intentions to reform morals and manners, the actual result was that the court was led into a sophistical system of thought and ethics which undermined traditional morality in which platonic love was more important than marriage and was the only criterion for true virtue. What conventional society branded as sin was condoned with hearty approval; even adulterous associations could thus be considered chaste and virtuous if the lovers “loved with their souls.” A. H. Upham, in The French Influence in English Literature from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration, has well described the flavor of this English soiree: “It was a Platonism given a gallant and courtly twist; welcomed, as it had been in Italy long before, as an excuse for more zealous love-making. . . . [It] became an exaggerated prudery combined with coquetry, a love relation not always pure, a series of intricate maneuvers according to false standards, one which proclaimed marriage a mere slavery.”14 Living by a code of their own, Henrietta Maria’s coterie created their own world, where the passion of love ruled supreme, invalidating any mere conventional morality. Essentially, this was not platonism at all, but a cheap imitation, an adaptation of platonic doctrine to an ephemeral code of conduct highly reminiscent of chivalry and knights. With further extension of this mode of thought, one arrives at Plato’s correlation of beauty and virtue. Beauty, being of divine origin, is an apt subject of worship, and, because love is the ultimate goal of beauty, lovers are incapable of sin. Such a line of reasoning removed any moral stigma which might have been attached to the actions of various lustful members of the court.
Jonson, seeing a certain contingent of court society despising its high standards and neglecting the basis for its greatness, once again is attempting to use satiric comedy to make a thoughtless group aware of its own importance and its neglect of its opportunities. He had stated elsewhere, “In Soveraignity it is a most happy thing, not to be compelled; but so it is the most miserable not to be counsell’d” (Discoveries, 11. 1235-37). As a poet who conceived of his vatic responsibilities quite seriously, he must have felt compelled to counsel the very center of the kingdom. He does so by devising a situation in which the controlling theme is—as in all of his comedies—the juxtaposition of true and false values or the comic incongruities arising from the confusion of reality and appearance. His comic intention is to ridicule the gullibility of those who are victimized by false appearances.
As mentioned previously, this satire can assume one of two forms. The guller can be shown victimizing a normal character who possesses the ability to discern the true value from the glittering tinsel but who has failed to train and to discipline his intellect properly and a choric figure such as Crites in Cynthia’s Revels or Penniboy Canter in The Staple of News, as a part of the mise en scene, can delineate the ideal of human conduct. In the second form the satire can set forth an entire stage world of gulls and gullers, as in the major comedies. In such a situation the commonsense of the spectator must act as the gauge by which both the naive dupe and the wily duper are exposed. The New Inn is of this second type. In this play, however, the object of satire is not primarily character types, but the false or misdirected concepts of love and valor and the institution of the court of love which they employ.
The stage world is filled with characters who typify the perversities of the court of love. There is Lady Frampul, to whom the idea of participating in such a court is exciting because a man will grovel before her and shower her with undeserved flattery. There is the servant Prue, the “she-sun” or queen for a day, who knows little enough about the morality of sensual love, let alone the intellectual niceties of spiritual affection. There is Laetitia (girl, boy, girl); her true identity as Lady Frampul’s sister unknown to all, she has for years been disguised as a young man in the service of the host at the inn. “For the sake of merriment” Lady Frampul disguises her as a maiden to be an attendant in the court of love, and, in turn, Lord Beaufort becomes desirous of her. In the rapid succession of sexual transformations and in the consequent confusion to Lord Beaufort when—the disguise partially revealed—he is told he has fallen in love with a boy, Laetitia renders comic the superficial kind of love which addresses itself to the body. There is Lovel, who with Lady Frampul ineptly attempts to establish the meaning of spiritual love. There is Beaufort, who not so ineptly does establish the meaning of carnal love with Laetitia. And there is the entire crew of rowdies below the stairs, who burlesque the action above, which indeed is burlesque enough in its own right. With no comic pointer the pattern in The New Inn is the same as that of the major comedies. As one character makes a fool of the other, or, in this case, as the group of characters makes a fool of the institution they portray, the good sense of the spectator must provide a sound rationale for perceiving the incongruities of the scene. Assuming an audience familiar with the ridiculous fad at the court, the elaborate ritual involving the wooing of Lady Frampul-Lovel and Laetitia-Beaufort casts ridicule on this philosophic perversion. The Renaissance-platonic love cult is seen in all its folly.
While the direct references to Plato are sufficient to establish clearly the basis which Lovel uses in his definition, Jonson indicates in several ways that this entire court of love is little more than the terminology of Plato adapted to less ethereal situations, and that as such it is essentially laughable. First, the lovers are comically incongruous. Lovel, with little strength of conviction in the matter, has agreed to this game of love as a playful pastime for Lady Frampul, and his participation is, by his own assertion, solely an attempt to overcome his disposition for melancholy. One moment he brands Lady Frampul a hypocrite and will go to any extreme to avoid seeing her; the next moment he praises her as a veritable paragon of virtue. His initial reaction to her arrival at the inn is insulting:
[I] am heartily sory,
Any occasion should be so compelling,
To vrge my departure, thus. . . .
I would not willingly
See, or be seene, to any of this ging,
Especially, the Lady.
(I, v, 22-24, 45-47)
She knows nothing about the real meaning of love but only its coquettish pleasures, for she is able “to loue no soule, or body, but for endes, / Which are her sports” (I, vi, 55-56). However, once he is speaking to her vis-a-vis instead of with others about her ridiculous contrivances, his tune is one of unbounded praise:
Had all the characters of loue beene lost,
.....
Both his nature, and his essence might
Haue found their mighty instauration here,
Here where the confluence of faire and good,
Meets to make vp all beauty.
(III, ii, 66, 69-72)
Urging a totally spiritual union, he relishes all in the name of “dignity, not pleasure.” Any physical union would be “drawing on a fellowship of sin.”
Lovel’s incongruity also extends through his defense of valor in act IV. He proudly proclaims the bliss and security of his stoic reserve:
A certaine meane ’twixt feare, and confidence:
No inconsiderate rashnesse, or vaine appetite
Of false encountring formidable things;
But a true science of distinguishing
What’s good or euill. It springs out of reason,
And tends to perfect honesty, the scope
Is alwayes honour, and the publique good.
(IV, iv, 40-46)
More specifically, to the man of valor, injury and insult are but the whetstones to sharpen his stoicism:
He can assure himselfe against all rumour!
Despaires of nothing! laughs at contumelies!
As knowing himselfe, aduanced in a height
Where iniury cannot reach him, nor aspersion
Touch him with soyle.
.....
The purpose of an iniury, ’tis to vexe
And trouble me: now, nothing can doe that,
To him that’s valiant.
(IV, iv, 134-38, 147-49)
Obviously, Jonson devises this equation of valor and stoic fortitude to ripen the character for dramatic exposure. Less than one hundred lines later Lovel, who “despaires of nothing” and whom it is impossible to vex, charges off to his room. Like Achilles in his tent, the braggadocio chooses to sulk and rant, his bravery and fortitude demolished by injured pride and a rejected suit. In short, he has contracted the “angry valour” or passion in ascendancy over reason which he so shortly before denounced as base and ignominious.
The incongruity of Lady Frampul’s action likewise underscores the artificiality of this court session. At the beginning of the wooing she is haughty, callous, and unrelenting. Yet, despite Lovel’s ridiculous contradiction of his lofty speech through his petulant and childish action, she grows enamoured of the fine oratory and would court him as the timeserver does the occasion. She quips that both he and the age are variable and that she could please him “if [she] but knew what drinke the Time now lou’d” (IV, iv, 232). In both characters the true colors are now apparent. In her ardor she is altogether antithetic to her former hauteur, as in his emotional sniveling he is a far cry from “a mind and spirit unshakeable.”
Moreover, the puns involved in Lady Frampul’s command to Prue in act V to find Lovel and to regain his favor are comically revealing. They help to expose the hypocrisy and pretension of her supposed adherence to platonic love. She assures Prue that her new gown is no less valuable because Pinnacia Stuff has worn it and has soiled it with grease:
It is restoratiue, Pru! With thy but chafing it,
A barren Hindes grease may worke miracles.
Finde but his chamber doore, and he will rise
To thee!
(V, ii, 15-18)
Obviously, the spectator would hear the adverb “but” as the noun “butt.” The “chafing,” “hinde,” “barren,” “chamber doore,” “grease,” “rise” take on bawdy overtones to delight the audience. Yet the dramatic context reveals that the wordplay is much more than mere bawdiness for its own sake. She is suggesting that the grease on the gown may spur Lovel to renew his amorous courtship because it has been warmed by Prue’s posterior—a far cry again from the concepts of platonic love she earlier commanded Lovel to defend.
A second means by which Jonson renders this court of love but a comic counterpart of true platonic love is the interspersed badinage of the host and Lord Beaufort. The host is the jovial observer of the ludicrous seriousness of the court proceedings. Prue’s opening remarks to Lovel are intended to augment the solemnity of the occasion:
For so your libell here, or bill of complaint,
Exhibited, in our high Court of Sou’raignty,
At this first hower of our raigne, declares
Against the noble Lady, a dis-respect
You haue conceiu’d, if not receiu’d, from her.
(II, vi, 140-44)
She then cites the specific objectives of Lovel’s trial:
To know your extraordinary merit;
And also to discerne this Ladyes goodnesse;
And finde how loth shee’d be, to lose the honour,
And reputation, she hath had, in hauing
So worthy a seruant, though but for a few minutes.
(II, vi, 149-53)
The court declares that Lovel will defend love to Lady Frampul for the space of one hour with his reward to be a kiss from the defendant. This defense must follow strict and formal rules. Queen Prudence tells Lady Frampul that Lovel is charged:
To entertaine you . . .
. . . with all respects,
And valuation of a principali seruant,
To giue you all the titles, all the priuiledges,
The freedomes, fauours, rights, she can bestow.
(II, vi, 159-63)
In burlesque deflation of this moment of high seriousness, the host quips that the court is not to be feared, though the injunctions be strict and the judge adamant, because the laws certainly will “not be kept.” The decrees of the court are, after all, as ephemeral as the queen and her ladies, the wind shifting “often, thrice a day sometimes.” Then, too, there is always the probability that flattery will prove an instrument for controlling the queen, who—when master of her own deeds—is by no means the chaste lawmaker her office would imply:
Pru may be a sage
In Law, and yet not soure; Sweet Pru, smooth Pru,
Soft, debonaire, and amiable Pru;
May doe as well as rough, and rigid Pru;
And yet maintayne her, venerable Pru,
Maiestique Pru, and Serenissimous Pru.
(II, vi, 222-27)
While the host’s gibes ridicule the pretentiousness of the court itself, Beaufort’s comments more specifically mock the artificiality of Lovel’s platonic pose. Lovel supposedly praises a true and spiritual love, but Beaufort, in quest of Laetitia, pursues quite a different course. To Lovel’s assertion that love is a pure desire to be joined eternally in spirit, Beaufort quips, “Loue was an appetite to be reioin’d. . . . Only, to kisse, and part” (III, ii, 82-84). To Lovel’s pronouncement that love progresses through the eyes to the heart, Beaufort retorts, “Here my whole seife, I tender,” not necessarily to “leape her” but to “lip her.” Later he quite frankly asserts, “I relish not these philosophicall feasts; / Giue me a banquet o’ sense. . . . Gi’ me the body, if it be a good one” (III, ii, 125-26, 155).
A third comic quality derives from the artificial formality of the court of love and the use of “low” characters for positions of importance within the court. A personal valet, constantly parroted by a coachman, majestically proclaims the trial with cries of “Oyez, Oyez, Oyez.” Appellant and defendant are singly called forth. First Lovel and then Lady Frampul enter, each slowly taking a station opposite the other. All participants in the trial are sworn to truth on the liturgy of love, Ovid de arte amandi, and are warned not to invoke any “inchanted Armes or Weapons, Stones of Vertue, Herbe of Grace, Charme, Character, Spel, Philtre, or other power then Loues only.” The mock kissing of the missal follows: “So helpe you Loue, his Mother, and the contents of this Booke: Kisse it” (III, ii, 44-49). As for the low characters, not only is Prue, a chambermaid, the sovereign of the court, but Jug, the tapster, and Trundle, a coachman, are the “criers”; Ferrett, Lovel’s servant, is “clearke”; and Jordan, the chamberlain, is “keeper of the peace.” This inversion, with the aristocracy on trial before their servants, emphasizes the ludicrous incongruity of the situation. Prue’s immediate reaction to being made queen is discomfort in this exalted position. Admitting that she is an imperfect orator, she timorously requests that Lovel “be pleased to add [his] suffrage to it [her reign].” The host intensifies her misery by mockingly quipping that he has always wanted to kiss a queen. Even though Lady Frampul maintains that “pride feels no pain,” Prue continues to suffer, being “thus translated, above all the bound of fitness and decorum.” Her unnatural position throughout the proceedings makes her the butt of the side comments of the other characters. Trundle, for instance, uses the conventional horse-whores pun: “Tis true you [Prue] are gentlewoman of the horse too. . . . I do think it my best t’obey you.” Later each of Prue’s legal decrees is seconded by the host of the inn with such remarks as “large ample words of praise, of a brave latitude!” “good!” “noble!” “rare!” “a hard condition!” Such indecorum helps to maintain a comic tone and makes it difficult not to read the long scene on love and valor as comic.
Jonson further emphasizes this incongruity through a farcical subplot. While the supposedly serious declamations progress, a broad, noisy, bantering group below (Sir Glorious Tipto, Fly, Hodge Huffle, Bat Burst, and Peck) create constant interruption and harassment. The marshaling of this household in military array by Tipto and the grandiose titles [deacon, doctor, captain, and quartermaster) assumed by the low characters parallel the artificial court above with servants assuming similarly grandiose titles and functions (queen, judge, and crier). Similarly, act IV depicts Tipto falsifying his vaunted courage by running from fisticuffs with Huffle just as Lovel contradicts his pompous claims to valor by falling into a fit of melancholy. While Lovel is being charged with melancholy and neglect of his service to his mistress, in the court below Peck is comically being accused of dishonesty in the care and sale of the horse. Again a pun on whores with a derogatory implication upon the “she-sun” above and her caretaker-procuress, Prue, is probably intended. Furthermore, during the pretentious declamations above, it is necessary several times to quiet the rowdies below. While Lovel proclaims that valor proceeds from judgment, not passion, Tipto and Huffle are throwing wine at each other, yelling and shouting in an argument as to whether the English or the Spanish are the more valorous. When Goodstock reprimands them for their behavior, Tipto retorts that the host is not master in his own house when he allows “your Lordship’s footman or your Ladies’ trundle” to command him as superior. Fly also claims it is quite proper for a “militia below” to exist “when chambermaids [above] are souereigns, wait their ladies.” The comic parallels and allusions between the two strands of action, too frequent for the careful spectator to miss, are another indication that the love and valor in this play are presented satirically.
If the reader accepts the assertion that The New Inn is a parody of false love and false valor, Jonson’s purpose in presenting such a court becomes clear. The platonic concepts are not comic per se; however, their sham counterparts are, in the coterie depicted in this play. When the discussions of love and valor are set in the context of this ridiculous court ritual, the incongruity augments the comic effect of the situation. Moreover, the grossness of the household servants, vainly aspiring to positions of culture and responsibility impossible for them to attain, underscores the pettiness of the courtiers engaged in trivial pretensions unworthy of their intellects and irresponsible in light of their positions.
While Jonson was the first to satirize the platonic cult, he had ample precedent for using a court of love in drama, even for using it for satiric purposes. Both Thomas Middleton in an entertainment for the king (1619) and Philip Massinger in The Parliament of Love (1624) had used the court of love and its romantic activities. More pertinent to Jonson’s satiric use of the device is John Marston’s Parisitaster or the Fawn (1606). Set in Italy, the comedy is largely devoted to satirizing the faults and follies of courtiers. In the court scene of the fifth act Cupid, attended by his train of Drunkenness, Sloth, Pride, Plenty, Folly, War, Beggary, and Slaughter, banishes the guilty ones to the Ship of Fools. Charges are brought against courtiers who “presume to wear at one time two ladies’ favours,” who hide base intentions behind beautiful words and expensive gifts, who slander and defame women’s honor with boastful tales of conquest, and who attempt to frustrate the development of true love between others. Each charge derisively exposes similar abuses among members of the court.
Admittedly, the satirical import of Jonson’s court in The New Inn is implied rather than overtly stated as in Parisitaster. Yet it is doubtful that the royal court, absorbed in Henrietta’s resurrected love cult, could view without chagrin these petty discussions of gallantry magnified into grave and solemn debates, managed with all the form and ceremony of a legal council.
Obviously, the validity of the preceding discussion of this play is directly dependent upon Jonson’s attitude toward the court of Charles I. Possible evidence of his critical attitude is found within the play itself—in the conversation in act I between the host and Lovel. While satiric references to the court are sufficiently commonplace in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature to prevent our drawing any definite conclusions that the playwright is expressing his personal views, the passage is nevertheless significant in relation to the court fad which the play is later to depict. Goodstock, the observer of mankind from the vantage point of his inn (a lord in disguise), specifically questions the intellectual and moral integrity of the court as he describes the education of his son (Laetitia in disguise). When Lovel requests the boy as page, the host retorts that he had rather make a clean riddance of him “then damn him to that desperate course of life.” He asserts that in his youth the courts had been nurseries of virtue where titles were earned, not vented as an item for common sale:
[G]oodnesse gaue the very greatnesse,
And greatnesse worship: Euery house became
An Academy of honour, and those parts—
We see departed, in the practise, now,
Quite from the institution.
(I, iii, 55-59)
Even more striking evidence of Jonson’s displeasure with the court and the perversities of the “cult of love” is found in the masque Love’s Triumph through Callipolis. Written in 1630, one year after The New Inn, the work again castigates a false platonic love. In a long prose section entitled “To Make the Spectators Understanders” Jonson carefully outlines his plot and meaning, affirming that such work should carry a mixture of profit and entertainment. Euphemus is to come from above to propound true love, its values and powers. Yet he must request that certain sectaries or depraved lovers, who know neither the name nor nature of love rightly though they boast themselves love’s followers, be banished so that true love might be reestablished. This idea is reiterated by Venus, Jupiter, Juno, Genius, and Hymen in a final chorus. Demonstrably, the central theme of the masque involves a contrast between true and false love, the false love present in the court to which a heavenly spirit descends demanding that the court be purged and a true scale of values reinstated.15
It would appear that Jonson knew perfectly well what he was doing and that his mind was far from turning out the “mere rotten debris of his genius,” now in “portentous mental decay.” Instead, The New Inn reveals itself as a clever, if not wholly successful, attempt to castigate the follies and corruption of the court, a theme which would add much piquancy to the allusion to the court in the “Second Epilogue.” Jonson has exposed derisively a sham counterpart of a platonic cult through Lovel’s inconsistency of word and deed, the mocking banter of the host, Beaufort’s passionately sensual interruptions, the artificiality of the court of love proceedings, and the comic parallel action of the group below the stairs to the group above.
One still must account for the strange, abortive romantic plot, which has been one of the major critical objections to the play. If Jonson’s use of false love and specious valor is considered as a general broadening of his satiric intent, the ridiculous romantic plot cannot be explained away as the work of a powerful brain in decline. Furthermore, he has not been reluctant in other contexts to speak his mind quite openly concerning his distaste for romantic comedy:
But now nothing is good that is naturali: Right and naturali language seeme[s] to have the least of the wit in it; that which is writh’d and tortur’d, is counted the more exquisite. . . . Nothing is fashionable, till it bee deform’d; and this is to write like a Gentleman. All must bee as affected and preposterous as our Gallants cloathes, sweet bags, and night-dressings: in which you would thinke our men lay in, like Ladies: it is so curious.
(Discoveries, 11. 575-78, 582-86)
According to Jonson, the age is addicted to the perversities of romantic comedy: love as the chief motive, an idealized heroine (who often masks as a man), love subjected to great difficulties, families broken up and eventually restored, and a general reconciliation and a happy ending:
There is a greater Reverence had of things remote, or strange to us, then of much better, if they bee neerer, and fall under our sense. Man, and almost all sort of creatures, have their reputation by distance. . . . And where our originali is knowne, we are the lesse confident: . . . [Resultingly,] in a Fable, if the Action be too great, wee can never comprehend the whole together in our Imagination.
(11. 1489-94, 2724-26)
In The Magnetic Lady the boy, speaking for the poet, ridicules the excessive extravagances of the hybrid form which has won the applause of the masses:
So, if a Child could be borne, in a Play, and grow up to a man, i’ the first Scene, before hee went off the Stage: and then after to come forth a Squire, and bee made a Knight: and that Knight to travell betweene the Acts, and doe wonders i’ the holy land, or else where; kill Paynims, wild Boores, dun Cowes, and other Monsters; beget him a reputation, and marry an Emperours Daughter for his Mistris: convert her Fathers Countrey; and at last come home, lame, and all to be laden with miracles. . . . These miracles would please, I assure you: and take the People!
(I, Chorus, 11. 16-26)
Jonson, in Epicoene, also condemns the miracles and general implausibility of the romances:
Yes, but you must leaue to liue i’ your chamber then a month together vpon Amadis de Gaule, or Don Quixote, as you are wont; and come abroad where the matter is frequent, to court, to tiltings, publique showes and feasts, to playes, and church sometimes: . . . In these places a man shall find whom to loue, whom to play with, whom to touch once, whom to hold euer. The varietie arrests his judgement.
(IV, i, 55-59, 61-63)
Jonson’s objections to romantic comedy center on lack of design or sacrifice of form for sensational effects. It was a hybrid form, and the poet disliked this hybrid quality.16 It would be hard to defend the satiric content of The New Inn if, in form, the play fails to correspond to the dramatist’s ars poetica. But Jonson clearly indicates by inserting this play in his list of humour comedies in the Induction of The Magnetic Lady he did not consider this play a romantic comedy (1. 102). Furthermore, those elements which may be called romantic comedy in The New Inn constitute only acts I, II, and V. Act III is taken up with the discussions of love and act IV with valor; both acts are static and detached as far as the romantic plot is concerned. In reality, the romantic plot serves as the frame device, the protasis and the catastrophe. The epitetical action develops the “true knot” of the drama, a satiric probing for true values among false appearances, presenting love and valor with their false counterparts in each case. The conclusion is not that Jonson was seriously trying to write romantic comedy any more than he was attempting to write a conventional morality in The Devil Is an Ass. If the major theme of the drama is intended to set off comically the ridiculous pretensions of these false concepts, what more logical framing device could be selected than one in which an equally ridiculous exaggeration and artificiality would be apparent?
Jonson attacks the kingdom of romance and outdoes the most imaginative of the romantic school—not, of course, to be logical and consistent or to create an air of verisimilitude, but to ridicule what he believed to be outrageous liberties taken by the romantic dramatists with both dramatic form and life in general. The separation of the Frampul family, the intricate series of disguises, and the reunion of them under one roof (unknown to one another and to spectators as well), and under completely different relationships, represent romantic invention at its wildest. The disguise of the elder Lady Frampul as an old nurse with an eyepatch and the host’s lack of knowledge about the sex of his own “adopted son” heighten the absurdity of the situation. The epitasis for which this action stands as a frame—the fantastic court of love with its orations on love and valor—is added. The plot is ridiculous, but aptly so, with its extremes and absurdities, if it is truly a parody of romantic comedy.
There is further intriguing corroboration that Jonson is consciously creating a parody of romantic comedy. The conversation in act I between Lovel and the host, on the surface merely a debate between the melancholy and the merry man, can be read as allegorical flyting between Old Comedy (Aristophanes-Jonson) and New Comedy (Menander—by extension Renaissance romantic comedy). More precisely, the scene might represent the dilemma which a poet faces: adherence to the higher principles of artistic decorum despite public reaction, or profanation of art for the gratification of the base desires of the masses. Such a reading is not implausible in light of the “sound and sense” explications of Jonson’s masques by Gordon, Talbert, Gilbert, and Furniss and in light of the similarity in purpose of this play and the masques—to counsel the court through entertainment and to speak to those who have the wit to understand.
To the inn in which Goodstock entertains has come Lovel, intent upon melancholy contemplation. But the host is determined to provide only for the jovial, those who willingly desire to lose themselves and their problems in the command: “Be iouial first, and drinke, and dance, and drinke.” Those who prefer the earthy and the realistic—to inspect or dissect the “flyes and fleas, and all variety / Of vermine”—he invites to move to another inn, for his inn will entertain, never instruct. Whereas every house was once an academy of honor devoted to instruction in virtue and breeding in nobility of mind, the times now are driven by the dictates of pleasure and materialistic profit. In such fashion, the host sits in his inn, imagining “all the world’s a Play.” He accepts the role of observer rather than instructor, and, consequently, he is content “to see the Comedy; and laugh, and chuck / At the variety, and throng of humours / And dispositions, that come iustling in / And out still, as they one droue hence another” (I, iii, 133-36).
If in this conversation the host’s comments reflect characteristics of romantic comedy and its incongruities, Lovel’s comments reflect the didactic principles of satiric comedy. Romantic comedy, involving an unrestrained passion which refuses to entertain melancholy or contemplation (“I must ha’ iouial guests to driue my ploughs, / And whistling boyes to bring my haruest home”), is juxtaposed with realistic comedy as Jonson conceived it, a force commanded to concern itself with “speculations that doe become the age,” which is concerned with providing manners “for the noblest ways of breeding vp our youth in arms, . . . or to tune his mind, or manners, more to the harmony of nature.” Romantic comedy is a debasement of the original aims of comedy.
Certainly, this reading makes more piquant the host’s genealogy. He (the principles of comedy which were degraded to the incongruous spectacle of romantic comedy) “did liue in Oxford, first, a student, and, after, married, with the daughter of—Silly, . . . of whom the tale went, to turne puppet-Mr.” Lovel: “And trauel with Yong Goose, the Motion-Man.” If this interpretation is an overreading, it is strangely coincidental that the material lends itself so readily to an allegorical interpretation which comments directly upon a parody of romantic comedy.
This analysis asserts that Jonson was a conscious critic of the court and the abuses prevalent within it and that his criticism is couched in oblique allegory and parody. As a writer of court masques, Jonson previously had used his pen in the same manner; he realized the value of being able to speak directly to the center of the kingdom and took advantage of the opportunity to promulgate his esthetic and ethical views. In fact, he specifically justifies oblique allusion for certain occasions: “But why doe men depart at all from the right, and naturall wayes of speaking? Sometimes for necessity, when wee are driven, or thinke it fitter to speake that in obscure wordes, or by circumstance, which utter’d plainely would offend the hearers” (Discoveries, 11. 2021-26).
Admittedly, much of the preceding commentary is matter which one would garner from an armchair reading, not witnessing an actual performance of The New Inn. Nevertheless, it tends to negate much criticism which has been offered, likewise from an armchair. Perhaps the failure of the play as a dramatic presentation results from the absence of a clearly developing narrative line, to which all characters contribute, and from the absence of a choric figure to direct the spectator’s attention into proper channels. Since Jonson’s primary satiric objects were the false values of pseudoplatonic love and romantic comedy, the various incidents within the work—such as the court of love, the low comedy of Fly, Pierce, Jordon, and company, or the surprise appearance of Nick and Pinnacia Stuff—gain their validity solely from the way they comment on the idea being discussed. The spectator is lost if he is not clearly aware of the relevance of the issues. While there is an underlying thematic unity, there is little apparent purpose or direction in the plot itself. By comparison, in Volpone the characters Voltore, Corvino, and Corbaccio thematically represent the vices of greed, avarice, and general misuse of intellect, but the story is interesting for its own sake. Jonson uses the various incidents and gulls to develop the duping by Volpone and Mosca to the point of highest intensity in the catastasis with a complete reversal of fortune in the catastrophe brought about by the thoughtless extravagance of both dupers. In The New Inn the story ambles at such a sluggish pace and with so many detours that, dramatically, nothing reaches a climax.
The intent of Jonson’s satire is quite consistent with that of his other work, but the plot, constructed to point obliquely, through parody, to the faults of the royal court, is simply too subtle—and hence too complex—for the stage and had little chance of being understood, especially on that first night by an audience largely unfamiliar with court intrigues and doctrinal fads. This is borne out by Jonson’s desire to furnish the reader an elaborate argument, an annotated dramatis personae, and an address to the reader in the 1631 printing. There is doubtless more fact than fancy in Edmond Gayton’s comments in 1654, from Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixote: “Though the Comoedy [The New Inn] wanted not its prodesse et delectare, had it been exhibited to a scholastic confluence; yet men come not to study at a Playhouse.”17