The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good

FOUR

FOUR Jonson ❖ The Truth of Envy Ben Jonson’s famous poem on William Shakespeare begins with a disclaimer. Jonson will draw no envy on Shakespeare’s name through inflated praise, even though neither man nor muse can praise Shakespeare’s writings too much. And “’Tis true” that “all men’s suffrage” (UV 26.5) confirms Shakespeare’s high worth. This truth claim, by further authorizing the disclaimer, pointedly links truth with envy, two abiding subjects in Jonson’s own works. The “Beloved . . . Author” of Jonson’s title, elsewhere called a friend much “loved . . . on this side of idolatry” (Disc 664–65), was Jonson’s most gifted rival in a cultural environment too often discolored by envious detraction and malice. Within this competitive environment, the self-assertive Johnson defined his own humanistic role as an arbiter of truth. Addressed to readers in this environment, the poem stands at the poetic threshold of the 1623 posthumous First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The virtual poet laureate, Jonson may have 192 Jonson: The Truth of Envy 193 written the dedicatory address, and he likely had a hand in arranging the volume. Publication of his own 1616 Folio, in dramatically breaking new ground for professional poets, had established an immediate precedent for Shakespeare’s first folio. Appropriately, Jonson was invited to write a commendatory poem; predictably, the self-assertive Jonson addressed his own complex relationship to Shakespeare as a friend, a rival, a dramatist, a poet, and a critic; and, not surprisingly, the poem has fueled continuing debate about this relationship. Though he admired Jonson, John Dryden groused that the poem was “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.”1 Alexander Pope bluntly disagreed, “I cannot for my own part find any thing Invidious or Sparing in those verses, but wonder Mr. Dryden was of that opinion. He exalts him not only above all his Contemporaries, but above Chaucer and Spenser, whom he will not allow to be great enough to be rank’d with him; and challenges the names of Sophocles, Euripides, and AEscylus, nay all Greece and Rome at once, to equal him.”2 Later discussion of Jonson’s panegyric falls somewhere between these two poles. Much significant commentary addresses the nuanced personal content — however allusive or implicit — as Jonson’s medium for defining Shakespeare’s poetic achievement. Jonson claims possession of Shakespeare: “My Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare” and “My Shakespeare.” For Jonson, poets personally inform their writings; these writings inform readers’ lives; readers thus possess the truth of these writings. Jonson’s possession celebrates both Shakespeare’s achievement and, assertively, Jonson’s critical measure of that achievement. As Shakespeare’s primary rival, he knows, perhaps enjoys knowing, that his self-assertion invites charges of envy. Both poets sought recognition in a centralized, hierarchical culture of competitive patronage networks and emergent market forces. Competition for place stimulated envious detraction and threatened truthful judgment. Jonson assumed the poet’s traditional humanistic stance as a moral counselor critical of that competitive world and its moral failures. He addressed those failures as an individual participating within the community, subject to its strengths and weaknesses. Unlike his rival, Shakespeare, who removes his own personal experience from texts written for a public audience, Jonson inhabits his works. But, like Milton after him, his commentary on his world is too often charged with the affect of immediate engagement. As we see later in chapter 6, the intemperance of pamphlet warfare stimulated Milton’s aggression and self-defensiveness. Similarly, Jonson personally wrestled with habits of envy and detraction that he attacked as cultural dangers. Jonson’s humanistic praise of Shakespeare’s achievement deliberately confronts those dangers that threaten the common good. The following discussion first addresses Jonson’s conception of a centered self contributing to common good, then the vocabulary of truth identifying his humanistic role as a poet, and finally, the cultural habit of envy that detracts from community , destabilizes the self and corrupts poetic responsibility. This chapter assumes that, for Jonson, it is in commitment to truth that the self establishes its stable center and its defense against envy. The Compass of the Self Like Donne and Milton, Jonson can be found everywhere in his works. He often speaks personally in the poetry and in the prefaces to the plays with aggressive candor and unmuffled feeling. A natural aggression straitens his humanistic sense of duty as a poetic...