Jonson Ben - Ben Jonson : the critical heritage

BEN JONSON: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

General Editor: B.C.Southam

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writers work and its place within a literary tradition.

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writers death.

BEN JONSON

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Edited by

D H.CRAIG

London and New York

First Published in 1990

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

Compilation, introduction, notes and index 1990 D H.Craig

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-19451-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19454-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-13417-X (Print Edition)

General Editors Preface

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writers historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures.

The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative qualityperhaps even registering incomprehension!

For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writers lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear.

In each volume the documents are headed by an introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the authors reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.

B.C.S.

Contents

Preface

This collection aims to include the most significant critical responses to Jonson that have survived from his own time and from the period up to 1800. In choosing what to reprint from the vast amount of material available I have concentrated on passages that pursue a line of argument or express a particular enthusiasm or dislike, and have generally passed over those that merely sum up the poets current reputation. Discussions of Jonson which were clearer when given with their context seemed especially appropriate; others, which were obviously important, yet could be adequately quoted in a phrase or a sentence, appear in the Introduction. The selections are more generous in the earlier periods, from which I have reprinted some fragmentary materials and some not unequivocally referring to Jonson. However, I have omitted items, like elements of some of the plays in the Poetomachia of early in the seventeenth century, which show Jonsons influence rather than give a critical perspective on his work; and I have drawn the line at documents which retail literary gossip apparently at second hand, and in no coherent form, such as the references to Jonson in Hemminges poem from the early 1630s (see William Hemminges Elegy on Randolphs Finger, ed. G.C.Moore-Smith (Stratford 1923), pp. 12, 1718).

I have made constant use of the edition of Jonsons works by C.H.Herford and P. and E.Simpson, Ben Jonson (192552). Their collections of responses to Jonsons work on stage in volume ix, and of documents comprising his Literary Record in volume xi, have made the work for this collection much easier. The seventeenth-century allusions to Jonson printed in J.F.Bradley and J.Q.Adams (eds), The Jonson Allusion-Book (1922), and in volume ii of G.E.Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (1945) have also simplified the task greatly.

I am grateful to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral, for permission to publish No. 26 from Canterbury Cathedral Literary Manuscript DIO; to the Bodleian Library, for permission to publish Nos 33, 36(g), 41, and 48 from MS Ashmole 38, No. 35 from MS Don. C. 24, and No. 73 from MS Clarendon 123; to the British Library, for permission to publish No. 31 from Harley MS 6057, Nos 36(f) and 37 from Harley MS 4955, and No. 50 from Additional MS 19255; to the Public Record Office, for permission to publish No. 36(e) from the Domestic State Papers, Charles I clv, no. 79, 1629; to the Oxford University Press, for permission to publish No. 30 from Ben Jonson, ed. C.H.Herford and P. and E. Simpson (192552), 11 vols, No. 43 from The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays, ed. L.A.Beaurline (1971), No. 65 from Samuel Butler, Prose Observations, ed. Hugh de Quehen (1979), No. 115 from Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men: Collected from Conversation, ed. James M.Osborn (1966), 2 vols, and No. 170 from Lichtenbergs Visits to England, trans. Margaret L.Mare and W.H.Quarrell (1938); to the Harvard University Press for permission to publish No. 169 from The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little, George M.Kahrl, and Phoebe de K.Wilson (1963), 3 vols, and to Unwin Hyman Limited, for permission to publish Nos 58, 63, 66, and 72 from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (197083), 11 vols.

Translations from Latin and Greek were generously supplied by my colleagues Dr Rhona Beare, Dr Bernie Curran, Associate Professor Michael Ewans, and Professor Godfrey Tanner; I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Dr Curran. I am indebted for most useful correspondence to Dr Nicole Bonvalet-Mallet, of the University of Alberta, to Mrs E.M.Coleman of the Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and to Dr Bryan Ward-Perkins of the Library at Holkham Hall, Norfolk. Professor Ian Donaldson shared generously his expert knowledge of Jonsons older critics; Professor Anne Barton offered many useful leads, and Dr G.W. Nicholls allowed me to consult his thesis on Aspects of Stage Productions of Ben Jonson, 166076 (St Davids College, Lampeter 1972). Dr C. S.Chubb kindly undertook a number of researches for me in the British Library.