ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION<br />
Retrospection: an act of poetic homage to literary interests that dominated the<br />
late Elizabethan imagination. The Tudor concern or obsession with England’s<br />
national past, for instance, the same dynastic interests motivating Shakespeare’s<br />
history plays in the early 1590s, appears at the outset in the six books of The<br />
Civile Warres betweene the two houses of Lancaster and York (begun in 1594), all<br />
written in that chosen Renaissance form for epic, the canto. Then appears the<br />
much briefer and more recent philosophical poem Musophilus (1599), dedicated<br />
to Sidney’s friend and future biographer Fulke Greville, in which the humanist<br />
ideal of the courtier poet is enacted once more. After that come two<br />
Neoclassical exercises, A Letter from Octavia (1599), in ottava rima, and the<br />
unactable Cleopatra (1594), produced at the request of Sidney’s sister, the<br />
Countess of Pembroke; and after that appear Daniel’s earliest productions, The<br />
Complaint of Rosamond (1592), linked to the still earlier Mirror for Magistrates<br />
tradition in both subject matter and form, and his Sonnets to Delia (1592). The<br />
whole is curiously circular in shape and nostalgic: the product of a Petrarchan<br />
courtier with one foot in the Sidney circle, responsive to “our Spenser,” seeking<br />
patronesses by writing frequently about women and still serving, in her twilight,<br />
his sovereign queen, to whom the volume is dedicated.<br />
Although Jonson thought Daniel “no poet” and was “at jealousies with him,” 8<br />
we ought not to view the publication of his Workes as in any way a direct retort.<br />
If Daniel is a better poet than Jonson allowed, Jonson’s sense of his own artistic<br />
superiority was sufficiently grounded that he could still allow Daniel the<br />
compliment of being a “good man”—not an empty gesture in Jonson’s ethically<br />
conscious lexicon. But Daniel’s Workes does pale, literally and metaphorically,<br />
against the thoroughgoing self- (one is tempted to say shelf-) consciousness of<br />
the Jonson folio. Published only fifteen years later, Jonson’s seemingly belongs<br />
to a different culture altogether, one less interested in pressing dynastic claims<br />
than in pursuing the rewards of peace: those of learning, art, and entertainment,<br />
as now epitomized in the figure on the throne, the Solomonic king who claimed<br />
to unite England, Scotland and Wales under the common banner of “Britain,”<br />
who placed the twin allegorical figures of Religion and Peace on the frontispiece<br />
of his own Workes, and who spent lavish sums of money on court entertainment.<br />
Not because of size alone, however, does Jonson’s folio ask to be housed with<br />
those other, prodigiously Jacobean literary productions contemporary with his:<br />
the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611), Raleigh’s History of the World<br />
(1614), and, of course, The Workes of King James, published in the same year as<br />
Jonson’s. Jonson’s folio overlaps in illuminating ways with each. It delivers a<br />
newly authorized version of canonical genres, plays and masques (previously<br />
considered ephemera); it shares, with Raleigh’s, a resourceful publisher in<br />
William Stansby, whose interest in producing two works of this scope and size<br />
allowed Jonson an extended opportunity to be actively involved in the<br />
production of his own book; 9 and it is a work that, while showing deference to<br />
the king on a number of particular occasions, nonetheless claims its own<br />
autonomous status. James is everywhere present within the text; nothing could<br />
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