ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
Donne, we are continually reminded, wrote for a private audience. Jonson, as
the above poem suggests, wrote from a deliberately social and socializing
perspective: “It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates/The entertainment perfect, not
the cates.”
Seventeenth-century poetry owes much of its character and variety to these
alternative models—the densely metaphoric and the richly metonymic, the
metaphysical and the social—and the kinds of significant extension and
refinement they received from later poets. But it is also dangerous (and the word
is deliberately chosen) to view Jonson in too sharp an opposition to Donne.
Both poets were born in the same decade—within a year of each other, in fact—
and in their choice of genre and idiom, favoring the “newer” urban modes of
satire, epigram, and verse epistle and emphasizing a language of matter over
manner, the concise utterance over the display of copia, both set themselves in
deliberate opposition to their fully Elizabethan predecessors—Spenser and
Sidney—and not to each other. And both were writers of unusual lexical and
imaginative strength. If it is one measure of a poet’s stature to have greatly
influenced others, then Donne and Jonson can lay equal claim to this palm. Both
have been routinely accorded their own schools, Jonson even in his own time.
Donne’s immediate fame as a poet was due in part to his fame as a preacher—
to the institution of the church. Much of Jonson’s reputation as an author came
from the simple fact that no one, not even Spenser, worked harder to establish
it. “A good poet’s made, as well as born,” he observed with august inclusiveness
in his eulogy to Shakespeare, 4 and for Jonson, this meant making as well as
making it on a number of different fronts: in the roguish world of the theater, in
the more refined world of the court, at country estates of the wealthy, at the
university, with the printing press—the principal institutions in the early
seventeenth century by which a resourceful poet, with serious pretensions to
artistry but who survived on the basis of his writings, might gain recognition.
Beginning essentially with Every Man in his Humour, first acted in 1598—I say
“essentially” because Jonson deliberately chose not to remember a number of
other “Elizabethan” productions including the Shakespearean sounding Richard
Crookback—and continuing at least through Bartholomew Fair in 1614, Jonson
put himself at the center of stage history by his continuous attempts to reform
the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater: to purge it of its popular vices (especially
sentimentalizing romantic comedy) as well as its medieval heritage by insisting
on a return to Classical models, Plautine as well as Aristophanic, and not simply
in the interest of serving the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, but
also in order to recover for the playwright the role of moral judge and lawmaker.
Horace is how he represented himself on stage in Poetaster in 1601. The poet
who was to translate the Ars Poetica not once but twice rarely strayed from that
pose in his later works.
As a partial outgrowth of his success in the theater and with comparable
revisionary gusto, Jonson also became the principal maker of masques under
James, a position he helped to secure with The Masque of Blackness, presented
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