Ben Jonson Plan

Ben Jonson
Plan:
Biography of famous writer Ben Jonson.
Literary works of Ben Jonson.
The role of Ben Jonson’s contribution to British literature.

Introduction
Jonson's presence in his own work can be interpreted as his way of expressing his dissatisfaction with theatre as a medium, and also as a means of imposing a measure of authorial control. His presence in his plays was not static: over the course of his career one can observe an increasingly subtle and less easily distinguishable presence. In this shift, we can see a concurrent change in the author's attitudes about his role as a playwright / poet, theatre and its audience, poetry, and his contemporaries. It is a gradual and subtle move from hubris and idealism toward at least the beginnings of a humility more consistent with his own time, and a grudging acceptance of the limits of the medium in which he worked, and his place within the wider context of the English Renaissance theatre.
The demands that Ben Jonson makes upon his audiences, as much as they were resisted in his own time, are often seen as a major strength by modern critics, a characteristic setting him apart from his contemporaries. T. S. Eliot writes, "Jonson behaved as the great creative mind that he was: he created his own world, a world from which his followers, as well as the dramatists who were trying to do something wholly different, are excluded" (78). This expectation of challenge associated with Jonson is reflected in a review by Peter Holland of a modern theatrical production of Jonson's The Alchemist, in which the critic complains that the performance supersedes the author's ideas, failing to give Jonson the author his due place.
This complaint is not unreasonable, as it is evident, from Jonson's own ambivalent attitude toward theatre expressed overtly or covertly in many of his plays and poems, that he himself felt that ideas superseded a pleasing performance. For example, Leatherhead in Bartholomew Fair worries that Littlewit's "puppet-play" will fail to impress:
Implicit in these lines is the playwright's own sense of degradation at having to please the ill-educated mob who will not tolerate plays with "too much learning." He wants to challenge his audiences, a difficult maxim to enforce in a medium which was seen, at least in the milieu in which Jonson wrote, primarily as a form of entertainment and diversion. A playwright who "troubles" his audience too much is causing trouble for himself, as Jonson discovered early in his career. [1]

Jonson's presence in his own work can thus be interpreted as his way of expressing his dissatisfaction with theatre as a medium for his own idea of art, and also as a means of imposing a measure of authorial control on an art form in which control is a tenuous thing and in a time when, as Jeffrey Maston notes, the concept of individual authorship was also tenuous: "...the author is a historical development - an idea that gradually becomes attached to playtexts over the course of the seventeenth century..."(370). This tendency of Jonson's has become as much a part of his legend as his off-stage life, as observed by Bruce Thomas Boehrer in his essay "Epicoene, Charivari, Skimmington" - "Jonson is...famous for obtruding his authorial persona onto the business of his plays..."(17) - and also L.A. Beaurline, who notes that "Jonson's expansive, difficult personality so permeates everything he did that it is possible to find the man in his work at nearly every turn." (317)

However, the following essay will argue that Jonson's presence in his plays was not static: over the course of a thirteen-year period, from Poetaster (1601) to Volpone (1606) to Bartholomew Fair (1614), one can observe, if not a graceful retreat by the author from the "business of his plays," then an increasingly subtle and less easily distinguishable presence: in the later plays the masks or personae he chooses to hide behind are more opaque (and more ironic and/or ambiguous), and an increasing number of characters serve as his mouthpieces. In this shift, we can see a concurrent change in the author's attitudes about his role as a playwright/poet, theatre and its audiences, poetry, and his contemporaries. It is a gradual and subtle move from hubris and idealism (about what his own work could accomplish in his time) toward at least the beginnings of a humility more consistent with his own time, a grudging (and always ambivalent) acceptance of the limits of the medium in which he worked, and his place within the wider context of the English Renaissance theatre.

Bruce Thomas Boehrer (in another essay, "The Poet of Labour") writes of Jonson's proprietary notions of authorship: "I take this complex of attitudes to be Jonson's single most revolutionary contribution to western literary history, leading as it does to the nineteenth and early twentieth century myth of isolated, elevated and autonomous authorial genius" (299). However, I would argue that Jonson became increasingly conscious that this notion was indeed, as Boehrer puts it, a "myth." Looking at the progression of his works over this period, his self-aggrandizement increasingly has a satirical edge, as though as he matured as an artist he became less, not more, satisfied with his work and less assured of his classical ideals. Leo Salingar suggests that in Jonson's work "...deeper needs to commend himself seem to have been at work. In his anger with the 'loathsome' ignorance and 'impudence' of his public, there may have been the spark of a suspicion that his own humanism was out-of date. Worse still, it may have been prompted by the suppressed recognition that his own comedies were not, after all, consistently the best he felt himself to be" (45-46).

Presumably, Salingar is speaking here of Jonson's later plays, because in Poetaster evidence of such self-doubt is as absent as Jonson the author is blatantly present. Here he obtrudes himself onto his work not behind a fictional mask or disguise as in Volpone or Bartholomew Fair, but behind the historical persona of the Roman poet Horace. Before this character is introduced, however, Jonson first takes the opportunity to defend himself in the Prologue against the personified "Envy" - a rather thinly concealed attack on his rival playwrights/detractors - which rails against "...this hated play..."(After the second sounding, 17). The Prologue comes in to answer Envy on behalf of the author: