Three basic conclusions may be drawn from a close study of the works of Jonson’s last twenty years. First, the aging poet stands firm in his support of satiric comedy despite the extravagant romantic trend of late Jacobean and Caroline drama. Second, he rigidly retains his neoclassical practices in the construction of plot. And, third, his work is artistically of a piece; the comic intent of the final plays is demonstrably consistent with that of his acclaimed masterpieces.
To the end Jonson was struggling against the increasing popularity of what he considered a decadent form of the comic art. With his early contemporaries Chapman, Marston, and Middleton he had firmly established in the first decade of the century realistic satiric comedy and the concept of the humour character. But romantic comedy dominated the field in the second decade. We hear of no play by Marston after 1613. Chapman’s dramatic career ended within two more years, and early in the decade Middleton deserted realistic comedy. Now the popular dramatists—all participating to some degree in the vogue of romantic comedy—were Fletcher, Beaumont, Massinger, Shirley (himself the author of some fifteen tragicomedies), and Davenant. As an advocate of satiric comedy based on sound ethical premises, Jonson stood virtually alone. Through his reputation and his coterie group, the “Sons of Ben,” he remained—along with Fletcher—a persistent influence on the drama. But his followers such as Field, Brome, Cartwright, Nabbes, Cockayne, Glapthorne, Mayne, and Randolph were neither the dominant personalities of the time nor totally consistent in the form of the comedies which they wrote, though they contributed to the ultimate development of the comedy of manners which was to emerge as the major comic form of the Restoration. More precisely, the artistic struggle of Jonson’s last years is reflected in the statistical records of Annals of English Drama1 which reveal a marked increase in those plays labeled “romance,” “pastoral,” and “tragicomedy” from 1615 until the closing of the theaters. In the face of such a trend Jonson’s deep respect for the humanistic aims of poetry, coupled with his scorn for the great bulk of contemporary comic drama, motivated him to attempt to redirect the comic stage in his final plays into what he considered its proper channels.
This explains both his careful description of the proper construction of the plot and his determination to break fresh ground for satiric comedy in his final plays. As we have seen, The Staple of News and The Magnetic Lady provide exegetical commentary to describe the proper form to the spectator who can see and comprehend it. More generally, the poet’s respect for the classical tradition is evident in the dramatic unities and the exacting five-act construction in each play. Yet, more important, the works are not dramatic reiterations. In these plays Jonson is attempting to adapt to his own purposes various elements of the native dramatic tradition—the morality play with its opposing forces contending for an uncommitted protagonist, the popular figures of the devil and iniquity, the story of the prodigal son, and romantic comedy with its cross wooings and multiple disguises and its fatuous lover and idealized heroine. Jonson has not sacrificed neoclassical principles to court the favor of the crowd; instead, he has attempted to revivify satiric comedy and to broaden its appeal through adaptation of aspects of the native dramatic tradition.
A fragment of a play discovered among Jonson’s papers after his death offers further evidence of this determined effort. Set in Sherwood Forest, The Sad Shepherd consists of two complete acts and approximately half of a third. Elaborate arguments are provided for each of the acts, numerous characters, and various strands of plot, but the central situation involves Aeglamour’s mourning for his lost love Earine, whom he fears has been drowned in the Trent. In actuality, Maudlin, a witch, has imprisoned the maiden in a tree. In alternate action Robin Hood and Maid Marian plan a feast, but these plans are disrupted by the witch with the aid of Douce, her daughter, and Lorell, her son. Disguising herself as Marian, Maudlin commands that the venison prepared for the feast be sent away and speaks insultingly to the perplexed Robin. When Alken, a sage shepherd, later tells him of the witch’s disguise, Robin attempts to apprehend her, and, were it not for the efforts of Puck-Hairy in her behalf, he would have succeeded. As it is, he is able to secure her magic girdle, broken during the escape. Meanwhile, Aeglamour hears Earine’s voice from the tree and, convinced she has become an angelic spirit, vows revenge on the river for drowning her.
First glance at the pastoral setting with its rustic shepherds and goblin spirits of the village green has led critics to state that Jonson’s railing tongue is now completely silent. Indeed, the statements vary only in degree. It is a splendid piece which we could not anticipate from anything else which the poet has left us;2 the play depicts a joyous reaffirmation of the beauty of life;3 “It does not sport with follies or with crimes, either for correction or for entertainment; and it does not set out to expose the evils of the age.”4
The impossibility of passing final judgment on a fragment must be admitted at the outset. After all, if we had only the first half of The Devil Is an Ass, or especially The New Inn, we could hardly perceive a satiric intent with any certainty. Yet, considered in this light, The Sad Shepherd is quite probably not the anomaly in Jonson’s canon which the commentators have claimed. In The Devil Is an Ass the conflict of gull and guller crosses the boundaries of the morality with mortal besting devil in the cozening of Fabian Fitzdottrel. In The New Inn Jonson examines the satiric possibilities of romantic comedy, thereby providing the appropriate mise en scene for his exposure of a hypocritical court fetish involving Queen Henrietta Maria herself. In The Sad Shepherd the constant experimentation is again reflected, and there is reason enough to interpret the play, albeit in a new setting, as reflective of the same Jonson and the same comic intent. There is even more reason to do so because of the consistency of aim and technique in every comedy and masque he has written since 1598. This stage world is apparently peopled not merely with rustic characters from the native English greens, but with Jonson’s customary aggregation of those whose deviation from normal behavior signals a naive and gullible temperament and those who are all too ready to exact either profit or pleasure at the expense of the gullible. The prologue promises a full array of love, hate, jealousy, rage, and melancholy in its attack upon the “Heresie of late let fall; / That Mirth by no means fits a Pastorall” (11. 31-32). It also reiterates the principle seen frequently in Jonson’s satiric comedies (but hardly apposite if we have entered the world of escapist romance) that the spectator should be alert and “this once more” hear him “for your owne sake” (1. 7).
On the one hand, Aeglamour the Sad and Amie the Gentle are excessively melancholy and consequently are unable to maintain normal conduct. Both mourn for love unrequited—Aeglamour for Earine the Beautiful and Amie for Karolin the Kind. Moping on the fields over which Earine has walked, Aeglamour is not interested in normal conversation and asks only that he be left to weep:
My drowned Love.
Earine! the sweet Earine!
The bright, and beautifull Earine!
Have you not heard of my Earine?
(I, iii, 21-24)
If such repetition is not a linguistic reflection of a character’s lack of rational control, it is the first time in Jonson’s work.5 Only a few lines later, Aeglamour’s sadness is hardly either rational or beautifully poetic:
When they [the torrents] have cast their body on the shore,
And it comes up, as tainted as themselves,
All pale and bloodlesse, I will love it still,
For all that they can doe, and make ’hem mad,
To see how I will hugge it in mine armes!
And hang upon the lookes, dwell on her eyes:
Feed round about her lips, and eate her kisses!
Suck of her drowned flesh!
(I, iii, 65-72)
He is determined to alter the complexion of the spring with his flood of salt tears. In like fashion Amie, minutes after being introduced to Karolin, threatens to “weep, and boile away my seife, in teares” (II, iv, 17): “All that is Karol, Karol I approve!” (II, vi, 93).
Equally extreme is the determined merriment of Robin Hood and his group. As Maid Marian busily prepares the feast which Robin has ordered, Much the Bailiffe is troubled lest Aeglamour’s melancholy mar the festivities. Robin himself welcomes all to his jolly bowers, commanding them to make use of youth and spirits:
[A]wake
The nimble Horne-pipe, and the Timburine,
And mixe our Songs, and Dances in the Wood,
And each of us cut downe a Triumph-bough.
(I, iv, 13-16)
“Jolly Robin,” like Sir Toby Belch, praises a “happy age” when all danced on the plain to “pipers loud” and when all did love and when lasses were given a green garment on the grass (I, iv). He quite cursorily dismisses complaints from fellow shepherds that, as a result of the constant merriment which leads the swains into vanity, the flocks are poorly fed: “They call ours, Pagan pastimes, that infect / Our blood with ease, our youth with all neglect, / Our tongues with wantonnesse, our thoughts with lust” (I, iv, 36-38). To Robin, as Clarion remarks, the only loss to be reckoned with is the time spent in such debating while there is dancing, loving, and wrestling to be enjoyed.
Both of these extremes of melancholy and of mirth—Aeglamour and Robin—are deceived by false appearances. In this pastoral scene the guller or deceiver is appropriately Maudlin, the Witch of Paplewick, with her offspring Lorell and Douce. She is aided in the unfinished third act by Puck-Hairy, or Robin Goodfellow, who warns her she must be wary and “pull in her sails,” lest the changing of her shape fail to protect her. After imprisoning Earine to send Aeglamour into spasms of melancholy, she perplexes Robin’s festivities by disguising herself as Maid Marian to destroy their love. All of this confusion, she proudly relates to her daughter, is but the delusion of the senses:
Have I not left ’[h]em in a brave confusion?
.....
This can your Mother doe, my daintie Douce!
Take anie shape upon her! and delude
The senses, best acquainted with their Owners!
(II, i, 1, 6-8)
There is in Alken what appears to be a comic pointer, although we cannot tell from the fragment to what extent Jonson would have developed the character. He is described as “A good sage Shepherd, who all-tho’ he weare / An old worne hat and cloake, [even in Sherwood Forest Jonson evidently considers fine clothes and frills as too often a façade to cover character perversion] can tell us more / Then all the forward Fry, that boast their Lore” (I, iv, 80-82). Later, Alken pointedly informs Robin that Maudlin (evil) can never really change her form; she can only deceive the senses of those who are gullible because they lack the proper perspective (II, viii).
The fragment does not allow us to carry the discussion further. But, all considered, the play—with gulls, gullers, and comic pointer—apparently is much closer to another variation of Jonson’s satiric pattern than to the work of a senile man who has laid aside his critical pen to indulge in pastoral fancy. One final bit of evidence is the listing in the dramatis personae of Reuben, “A devout Hermit,” as The Reconciler. Precisely what he was to do no one can say with certainty. In light of Jonson’s earlier practice, it is quite possible that Reuben, like Lovewit in The Alchemist or like Ambler in The Devil Is an Ass, was to be introduced at the point of the catastasis to bring about a proper resolution of the plot in the final act. If Jonson were working on The Sad Shepherd at the time of his death, it is not necessary to explain away the piece as totally unlike anything else he had done. Instead, it is another illustration of the experimentation which characterizes Jonson’s late comedies in his constant attempts to make a greater range of the dramatic art compatible with his comic intent.
Despite their failures as stage pieces, these late works reflect a comic intent consistent with that of Jonson’s earlier and more popular productions. To the last, Jonson is the satirist cauterizing through his plays the prevalent ills and abuses which he observes, depicting these evils in a ludicrous and reprehensible light, and laughing them from society by exposing their asininity. The eyes of the “reasonable man” consistently act as the gauge through which the evils or abnormalities are evaluated. Hence, the outright dupers such as Meercraft, Lady Tailbush, Cymbal, Picklock, Penniboy Senior, Polish, and Sir Moth Interest, are reprehensible. Also, those who are duped as a result of their own gullibility, such as Fitzdottrel, Guilthead, Eitherside, Penniboy Junior, Palate, Silkworm, and Practice, are reprehensible. If there is any room for the word “villain” in Jonson’s work, it must apply to those individuals who possess normal intelligence but, through a series of ill-considered actions and lack of moral and intellectual discipline, make themselves the prey of the avaricious and the unethical. The poet’s main desire is not so much to bring the dupers to justice as to laugh at those who are their willing victims, thereby derisively indicting gull and guller alike. Even though both the central situations—what Wallace Bacon labels the “magnetic fields”—and the particular objects of scorn (monopoly, projection, newsmongering, a pseudoplatonic cult, sham valor, a marriageable heiress) are constantly shifting, Jonson’s comic intent is static.
The work of Jonson’s final years is compatible with that of his earlier life, although the last plays were rejected by his contemporaries and have been subsequently neglected by his critics. Nevertheless, in what they reveal of the playwright’s theory and practice, they deserve more careful attention than they have been accorded. The brief and undistinguished runs are, after all, hardly accurate gauges of their dramatic merits. As we have seen, any number of factors could have contributed to the public disapproval—poor acting; hostile audiences; complicated plots which, without the argument, dramatis personae, and stage directions, the audience seemed unable to comprehend rightly; a dogmatic, irascible dramatist, quick to retort to an unreceptive audience; the comparatively short-lived fashion for satirical plays. Few plays could find popular success against such odds. Even so, Jonson consciously attempted to emphasize the comic potentiality of his situations, while adhering to his theory that drama is a proper vehicle for ethical teaching. Though certainly not his greatest works, these late comedies do possess depth and purpose, and hence are not “dotages” in this sense of the word. They have been constructed with the same care and precision which characterize the poet’s masterpieces. Jonson, in character until the end, did not, like Shakespeare via Prospero, break his staff and drown his book. Instead, he stubbornly flaunted his art in the face of an unreceptive audience and an age delighted with the frivolities and the impalpabilities of romantic comedy.