ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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