ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
be clearer than Jonson’s presentation of himself as James’s poet: but the king is
absent where we might most expect to find him, in the dedication.
Jonson’s Workes is the work of an author, not a poetaster. It represents a
conscious and conscientious “advancement of learning,” to borrow Bacon’s title
and apply it to his friend. The thousand-plus, large-size pages gather together all
Jonson’s significant publications to date, placing them in chronological order
within their appropriate genres and introducing the whole with a lavishly
engraved title page that spells out the thoroughly artistic concerns of the
contents. A Roman theater appears in the central cartouche, flanked by
allegorical figures representing Satire and Pastoral, with Tragi-comedy above.
Directly below, framed between Tragedy and Comedy and further set off by
Corinthian pillars, is the announcement, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson,
accompanied by the motto from Horace: “neque, me ut miretur turba,/laboro:/
Contentus paucis lectoribus” (I do not work so that the crowd may admire me: I
am contented with a few readers). 10 Some of Jonson’s “few readers” are then
made manifest in the Table of Contents, or “The Catalogue,” where the list of
dedications is as impressive as the list of individual texts. The horizontal pairing,
in fact, of text and dedicatee presumes a kind of easy reciprocity existing
between author and patron, as if to say, here at last is an English poet finally at
home in a variety of distinguished settings; here at last is a poet who has earned
his keep.
The volume then proceeds to historicize, without mummifying, the poet and
his literary productions as it attempts to reinforce the shift in cultural values and
generic hierarchy that Jonson himself sought to determine on separate occasions.
The individual plays no longer appear as shoddy quartos but have been
transformed into dramatic artifacts, part of theater history, and yet done so with
the intention of preserving, through careful punctuation, their performative
features: “their dramatic and rhetorical effects.” 11 Each is introduced by a
separate title page, with the one constant amid the changing descriptions being
the recurring imprint, “The Author B.J.” Each is also framed by a concluding
page that lists the players (Every Man in His Humor includes the name “Will
Shakespeare”) and gives, once again, the year in which the play was first acted.
The masques and entertainments are likewise enrolled in a permanent hall of
records. Treated now as cultural documents, they are presented as fully capable
of existing on the strength of the text alone and some detailed notes by Jonson
describing scenic particularities and allusions. Only the two volumes of poetry—
The Epigrams and The Forest—evade, to a degree, this historicizing process; but
they make their mark in other ways. Calling The Epigrams, as Jonson does, his
“ripest studies,” is akin to preserving ephemera like plays and masques, at least
in that it consciously dignifies a traditionally lowly form of poetry (Puttenham
called epigrams “privy nips, or witty scoffes”); 12 while The Forest, after Jonson
coyly separates it from a vast tradition in the Renaissance with a brief apology
about “why I write not of love,” offers itself as the first miscellany in English
patterned on classical forms—perhaps even the first collection of verse in
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