Volpone and Other Plays

VOLPONE AND OTHER PLAYS

BEN JONSON was born in 1572, the posthumous son of a minister, and thanks to an unknown patron was educated at Westminster School. After this he was for a brief time apprenticed to his stepfather as a bricklayer. He served as a soldier in the Low Countries and married sometime between 1592 and 1595. In 1597 he began to work for Henslowe’s company as a player and playwright and during the following two years two groundbreaking comedies, Every Man in his Humour and Every Man out of his Humour, were produced. These were followed by Cynthia’s Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601). Jonson’s great run of comedies consists of Volpone (1606), Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614). In addition to his comic writing Jonson also produced two powerful Roman tragedies, Sejanus, his Fall (1603) and Catiline, his Conspiracy (1611). After 1616 Jonson abandoned the public theatre for a decade, concentrating his efforts entirely on the court masques, a form of entertainment that reached its highest elaboration in his hands, and his sporadic returns to comic drama in the Caroline period met with less popular success than his Jacobean masterpieces. In 1616 he was granted a royal pension and made, in effect, Poet Laureate. His latter years were unhappy, though. Under Charles I he lost favour and was replaced as masque-writer after quarrelling with Inigo Jones, the masque-designer. He also suffered from paralysis and was unable to publish the second volume of his Workes. Ben Jonson died on 6 August 1637.

MICHAEL JAMIESON studied at the University of Aberdeen, Princeton University, and King’s College, Cambridge. He was on the staff of the University of Keele for two years before going to the University of Sussex in 1962 as a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies. He has also taught at the University of Rome and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has published a study of As You Like It and articles on Elizabethan acting and on modern theatres for Shakespeare.

BEN JONSON

Volpone and Other Plays

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

MICHAEL JAMIESON

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This collection published in the Penguin English Library 1966
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1985 as Three Comedies
Reprinted under present title 2004
6

Introduction and Notes copyright © Michael Jamieson, 1966
All rights reserved

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Select Bibliography

Preliminary Note to Volpone

Epistle to Volpone

VOLPONE, OR THE FOX

Preliminary Note to The Alchemist

A Note on Alchemy

THE ALCHEMIST

Preliminary Note to Bartholomew Fair

BARTHOLOMEW FAIR

Additional Notes to Volpone

Additional Notes to The Alchemist

Additional Notes to Bartholomew Fair

INTRODUCTION

I

… Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson’s learnèd sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.

THIS, I suppose, is the context in which many of us as school-children first came upon the mere name of Ben Jonson. It occurs in John Milton’s L’ Allegro, in that passage where the poet, talking of the nocturnal pleasures of city life, enthuses over the comic theatre. It is ironic that the second line, which contains Milton’s tribute to the master of English comedy, should have become a puzzling allusion which young minds are required to explain at O-level. Yet Jonson belongs with those writers whom one is often expected to know about rather than to have read.

I was fortunate in that I next came upon Jonson in the theatre, when Donald Wolfit was playing Volpone and relishing that archpredator’s sardonic villainies. That Jonson could still be a great entertainer came as a revelation. He belongs on the boards, as Milton indeed was suggesting in the expression ‘well-trod stage’, but the doubly allusive lines from L’ Allegro seem, from the way in which they demand foot-noting, sadly symbolic of Jonson’s reputation among readers today. The ‘learnèd socks’ are the slippers Greek and Roman actors wore in comedies; in these lines Jonson, the classically erudite writer of comedy, is epitomized in an allusion from the theatre of the Ancients by a poet of even greater classical erudition. But Milton expected his readers to recognize also a graceful compliment to Ben Jonson, for in this author’s own poem in Shakespeare’s memory prefaced to the First Folio, ‘sock’ is similarly used:

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,

From thence to honour thee I would not seek

For names; but call forth thund’ ring Aeschylus.

Euripides, and Sophocles to us….

Or, when thy socks were on,

Leave thee alone, for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

In Milton’s four lines we seem to find several aspects of Jonson which are daunting to the general reader of books – his classicism, his great learning, his tendency (like Milton with ‘learnèd sock’) to need explanatory notes, and, of course, his complete contrast to William Shakespeare. Milton is, in fact, praising Jonson, placing him first, and being, if anything, condescending about Shakespeare. But that is not how the lines strike us at first reading today, for we put a higher value than Milton did on spontaneity, and are quick to sniff pedantry in a ‘classical’ writer. There is something daunting about Jonson’s present-day reputation; and anyone introducing a volume of his plays has to begin by stressing what ought to be obvious – that his three best comedies are still very funny, that they make splendid reading, and that they are vivid, lucid, and marvellously actable stage-plays.

Critics have already dwelt, a shade lugubriously, on this daunting aspect of Jonson’s work. In 1919 T. S. Eliot wrote:

The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries – this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.1

In 1938 Professor Harry Levin continued in a similar vein:

Ben Jonson’s position, three hundred years after his death, is more than secure; it might almost be called impregnable.