"Divided Amongst Themselves": Collaboration and Anxiety in Jonson's Volpone

Literary critics often point to Volpone as a watershed in Ben Jonson's development as a dramatist--the play that marks the transition from his moderately successful comedies of humors and the failure of Sejanus to his great middle comedies. Explanations for this transformation are plentiful. Focusing on Jonson's dramaturgy, Anne Barton argues that "the influence of Aristophanes is central and shaping" in Volpone, and that it rescued Jonson from the artistic "impasse" of his earlier comedies. David Riggs's biography explains the transformation in psychological terms, suggesting that the play marks "the arrival of Jonson's maturity in a psychological, as well as an artistic, sense" and proves that he had successfully "confront[ed] and utiliz[ed] impulses that he had hitherto kept at bay." And in his study of rivalry among early modern playwrights, James Shapiro straddles the line between artistic and psychological development and claims that Volpone is the first play in which Jonson successfully deals with the anxiety of Marlowe's influence. ¹ So while there is no consensus about why Volpone is such a pivotal work for Jonson, it clearly holds a strategic position in narratives of his development. To a significant degree, how we read Volpone and how we register its differences from Jonson's earlier drama determine how we construct Ben Jonson as dramatist and author.

Complicating this problem, recent studies have emphasized the extent to which the post-Enlightenment notion of the individual author is anachronistic with regard to early modern England in general and early modern drama in particular. ² The contemporary critique of the author inevitably raises questions about the validity of constructing narratives of authorial development. These questions are especially pressing for studies of Jonson, since the concepts of author and authorship as we have come to understand and deploy them in relation to early modern drama are very much the historical products of his career. Jonson's development as an author, in other words, cannot be divorced from his contributions to the development of the concept of authorship itself. His insistence that the plays he wrote and sold to acting companies remained his works, and that he had the right to revise and publish them was unique, indeed revolutionary, and became profoundly influential. Jonson's tenacious claim to authority over his plays worked to naturalize the relationship between playwright and play. It initiated what Roland Barthes calls "a process of filiation," as it transformed play texts into literary works. ³ This process binds texts to authors as children are bound to parents, so that they provide access to their author's intentions or psyche. At the same time, this connection to the author serves to limit the possible meanings of the texts, since they can only reflect the conscious or unconscious design of the author. The paternal and patriarchal tendencies of this authorial model become clear as Jonson continually asserts that his plays are his legitimate offspring and that he is their legitimate progenitor. ⁴ It is this recursive and seemingly natural relationship between author and work which tacitly underwrites our narratives of authorial and artistic development. If we treat this filial notion of authorship as a transhistorical given, we find ourselves reading Jonson's early works through a lens that does not emerge until later in his career, and thus we blind ourselves to the process by which that lens is produced. Rather than focusing uncritically on Jonson's evolution as an author, we must examine how he establishes his authorship.

In this essay I explore a crucial but neglected aspect of Jonson's drive towards authorship: his relationship to collaborators and collaborative playwrighting. Although collaboration was the dominant mode of play production in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, and Jonson engaged in this collaborative practice for nearly ten years, the studies that have addressed Jonson's authorial self-fashioning have ignored his relationship to collaboration. ⁵ But collaborative playwrighting, which dispersed textual authority...