ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
in the second year of the king’s reign (1605). Jonson’s reach extended now into
the court and stretched, artistically speaking, in a more deliberately allegorical
and Neoplatonic direction. For a while, it also included a productive
collaboration with Inigo Jones, England’s first Neoclassical architect and
inventor of elaborate stage machinery, who managed the difficult task of pleasing
two kings, James and Charles. And, as a writer of masques and entertainments,
Jonson served some of the most powerful families in England. He did so
sometimes on their estates, as with the early pastoral entertainment presented
at Althorpe in 1603 for that most artistically patronizing of families, the
Spencers (Spenser claimed them for kin; Shakespeare and later Milton wrote for
some of the family members, and they remain in the news today); and
occasionally at court when James chose to honor one of his favorites.
Throughout his long career, moreover, a career that extended into the 1630s,
the poet who never went to university but was a student of the most famous
historian of the period, William Camden, and who came of age under a monarch
who took special pride in appearing wise; the poet who, according to
Drummond, “in his merry humour …was wont to name himself The Poet,” 5 was
busy presenting himself as the most learned author of his day. It seems only fair
that the author who dedicated Volpone to the two universities in England should
receive an honorary degree from at least one (Oxford, 1619).
Individually, these literary acts or occasions were often impressive as well as
expensive. Collectively, they helped to constitute a new version of poetic
authority, which Jonson invites us to witness in that audacious and notorious
“miscellany” of his published in 1616 when the poet had reached middle age,
his Workes (fig. 1). 6 By the end of the sixteenth century, it had become common
enough for aspiring poets to publish their verse in individual editions (usually
quartos), although aristocrats like Sidney and those wishing to preserve their
aristocratic connections like Donne generally disdained the medium of print in
favor of circulating their poems in private manuscripts. Indeed, by the early
seventeenth century it was even possible for a veteran poet like Jonson’s
occasional rival, Samuel Daniel, to attempt to advance his cause by putting out
a large-page edition of his Workes in 1601. But Jonson improved on both of these
precedents by extending to himself a privilege that so far in English literary
history had been allowed only to canonical writers of the past, usually of the
distant classical past. He collected, edited, and published his oeuvre, or to use
the Latin term everywhere begged by Jonson’s massive folio but not by Daniel’s
collection, his opera. When T.S.Eliot remarked some three hundred years later
that a true understanding of Jonson begins with “intelligent saturation in his
work as a whole,” 7 Jonson would not have wished it otherwise.
To set Daniel’s Workes momentarily alongside Jonson’s is also to glimpse a
significant dimension of the shift in taste that occurred, if not immediately then
gradually and profoundly, in the transition from Elizabeth to James, a shift that
Jonson helped both to inaugurate and to confirm. Coming at the end of
Elizabeth’s reign, Daniel’s Workes functions, in many regards, as a Masque of
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