The Women of Ben Jonson's Poetry (review)

Reviews 235 alchemical oeuvre, and includes some intriguing coloured illustrations of the alchemical king crawling naked under his mother's skirt to be reborn, the pregnant queen in bed, and the peacock, in a manuscript of Sir George Ripley's 'Cantilena' (Additional M S 11, 388), published for thefirsttime, as far as I a m aware, and not recorded in Jacques van Lennep's comprehensive collection, Alchimie. But though Dr Roberts valuably includes examples of the use of alchemical terms, concepts and symbols in literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he fails to acknowledge any of the numerous published studies in this area. This is a major area of current scholarship, and its omission is a major failing of the study. The Mirror of Alchemy is well written and wide-ranging. It will be a handy reference work not only for those who are new to alchemy, but also for scholars working in thefield.It includes a helpful glossary of alchemical terms, materials and flasks. Yet it does not add anything substantial to the ground so well covered by F. Sherwood Taylor's The Alchemists: Founders of Modern Chemistry and E. J. Holmyard's Alchemy, both of which are still in print. Lyndy Abraham School of English University of N e w South Wales Smith, Barbara, The Women of Ben Jonson's Poetry, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1995; cloth; pp. ix, 132; R.R.P. £29.95. The Women of Ben Jonson's Poetry is a study of female representation in Ben Jonson's non-dramatic verse. Barbara Smith presents herself as a feminist critic in a qualified manner, but sets out to combat earlier critics of the plays who have drawn 'some oversimplified and questionable conclusions about misogyny in Jonson' (p. vii). In Smith's most convincing and satisfying section, 'Praise', she conducts a careful exposition of the ways in which gender considerations compel Jonson to praise his female subjects differently from his male ones. For example, his praise of women tends to idealise them and reduce their virtue to sexual continence, whereas males are not idealised, but praised for their worldly activity. Smith proceeds to discuss the carefully-crafted praise necessitated by the patronage economy, and finds that while individuals receive praise, types are the vehicles for the most biting satire. A n analysis of female patrons' lives from non-literary sources 236 Reviews leads to the conclusion that in some cases Jonson tactfully omitted the vices of his objects of praise but in other cases, genuinely admired these women. Finally, Smith treats the influence of Martial, Juvenal and Horace on the satirical elements of Jonson's verse, charting his divergence from his classical sources. In the process, she absolves him of the charge of misogyny, noting that although Jonson attributes certain forms of corruption specifically to women, he devotes much time to praising virtuous w o m e n as his classical antecedent Juvenal, for instance, does not. Smith's readings are original and perceptive and her comparison of Jonson and his classical fore-fathers is acute. However, I found it disappointing that she did not stray further from the formal level into questions of ideology and historicity. Indeed, she seems to resist mixing politics with art. Discussing the tendency to devalue Jonson's poetry because it was produced within a patronage economy, Smith asserts 'To appreciate Jonson is to appreciate the poet's craft. One may well suspect Jonson's political motives; he needed to survive in a system based on the favours of patrons. What impact does this have on the merit of the poems as art? None' (p. 40). Although I agree that it is a mistake to conflate the aesthetic and the political, I find that m y judgment of Jonson is deeply affected by the apology for the dominant social classes that his economic dependence on them inevitably produces. One does not have to be a particularly rabid materialist to feel a little queasy on encountering the jolly rural folk of the Wroth estate. This severing of the political and the aesthetic sits uneasily with Smith's own partial and reactive engagement with the politics of gender. She repeatedly protects Jonson...