Body and Book

Ben Jonson's The Staple of News is a play about print. It is also a play about playing, as the 'Intermeans' between each act make clear, with four old women on stage squabbling over their reactions to what they have just witnessed. These two concerns are not fundamentally removed from each other, but rather interact in a number of ways, chief amongst these being the repeated suggestion of an analogy between the body and the printed text. The Staple of News shows considerable anxiety about the interrelation between bodies and texts, and the way both can be manipulated, marketed and even reproduced, illicitly or to immoral ends. Ideas are embodied in this play in the literal sense – the character of Pecunia is reminiscent of a character in a Morality play, or of the Lady Meed figure in Piers Plowman, another female embodiment of material reward whose corruption is similarly figured in sexual terms. One clue to Jonson's agenda is perhaps to be found in the first act, when the prodigal character Pennyworth Junior dispenses conspicuous patronage to his barber, Thomas, and arranges for him to fill a position at the newly invented Staple of News. Despite the fact that the play takes its name from the Staple, it is mostly a sub-plot, of secondary importance to the rehabilitation of the prodigal Pennyworth, but whenever it is discussed Jonson's contempt for it is clear, and, as ever fearing misinterpretation, he even inserted an explanation before the third act: 'consider the news here vented to be none of his [the author's] news, or any reasonable man's, but news made like the time's news (a weekly cheat to draw money)'. Given this attitude, it is fitting that the first character we witness joining the nascent industry is a barber – known for chopping and (perhaps) even mutilating the bodies of his clients, much in the same way, one would imagine, as Jonson viewed the production of news stories for a gullible public.

This exchange between theMaster of the Staple and one of his reporters further draws attention to the bodily and sexual terms in which the textual dissemination of news was regarded:

Cymbal. And gentle reader –

Fitton.   He that has the maidenhead Of all the books.

Cymbal.   Yes, dedicated to him –

Fitton. Or rather, prostituted –

(I. v. 33-5)

Jonson's characters play with conventional terms of address to readers, suggesting a sexual interaction between the consumer of the book and the text itself. The conventional idea of a text as an orphan in need of parenting fromthe generous reader (propagated by, amongst others, Heminge and Condell in the 1623 Shakespeare Folio) is manipulated here so that the child/text has grown up, and entered themurky world of the Jacobean market-place, in which sexuality is the ultimate economic leverage.

Many of the chapters in Marta Straznicky's edited collection draw implicitly on this metaphorical link between bodies and texts. The Staple of News is discussed in Alan B. Farmer's contribution, 'Play-Reading, News-Reading, and Ben Jonson's The Staple of News', though admittedly Farmer's focus is not the body, but Jonson's unease with the religious import of the news that was being so freely distributed. However, the often fraught interactions between bodies, texts, the theatre, and a rapidly expanding cash economy aremajor concerns of many other contributors to this excellent volume. The terms of the dramatic exchange quoted above suggest Jonson's sense that learning was being debased by the rapid reproduction of texts and their wide availability to readers who may not have been educated (or noble) enough to understand them.

While Jonson here mocks the conventional language of printers' addresses, the rapid expansion of such epistles in the early modern period can nonetheless provide evidence of how readers were imagined, constructed, or directed in their reading by the authors and publishers who wrote them. Cyndia Clegg's opening chapter, 'Renaissance Play-Readers, Ordinary and Extraordinary...