Jonson among the Romantics

In a letter to The Gentleman's Magazine in November 1772, one reader, 'Horatio', commented that if Shakespeare was 'not for an age but for all time', then Ben Jonson was the opposite. Shakespeare's drama had universal and enduring interest and appeal; Jonson's work, however, was irrevocably tied to the period in which he wrote. His reputation had been high during his own lifetime but in decline ever since, and there seemed little likelihood that interest in him would ever revive.

Time has, of course, proved this prediction untrue. The scholars and critics of the eighteenth century would be amazed at the scale of the modern literary industry devoted to analysing Ben Jonson and his writings, and at the popularity that many of the plays still enjoy on the stage. Jonson has not faded from view, as those like 'Horatio' predicted he would. His works have remained the subject of literary and theatrical interest and attention, reappropriated and reinterpreted by succeeding generations of writers, actors, critics, and audiences.

In this book, Tom Lockwood has performed the valuable task of assessing what role Jonson played in the culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, examining how his works were regarded and interpreted by critics, editors, writers, theatre managers, actors, politicians, and cultural commentators between 1776 and 1850. The label 'the Romantic Age' is thus used by Lockwood in the broadest sense, to signify the whole historical period rather than the works of a few specific poets and novelists. As he writes, his aim is not to examine a specifically 'Romantic' Jonson, or a Georgian Jonson, or a Regency Jonson, but rather 'to juxtapose many different Jonsons . . . to study the points of fit between these varying accounts of him and his writing, and to see how the many varied constructions of "Jonson" engage and interact' throughout the period (pp. 7–8).

Until now, it has been commonly believed that Jonson was, if not entirely irrelevant to the Romantics, at least of little real significance. Jonson – so this argument goes – was widely admired in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but in a rather perfunctory way. He was seen as a titan of English literature, but one whose works were increasingly out of key with modern tastes and sensibilities. He was obscure and heavy; a negative counterpart to Shakespeare, laboured where Shakespeare was easy and unforced, gloomy where Shakespeare was sunny, classical and correct where Shakespeare was natural, creative, and intuitive. Those writers and critics of the time who were seriously interested in Jonson and influenced by his works were the exception rather than the rule.

However, as Lockwood shows, Jonson's reception and influence in the Romantic age were both more complicated and more considerable than this assessment allows. Not only did his most famous plays – Every Man In His Humour, Volpone, Epicoene, and The Alchemist – hold their popularity on the stage throughout the period, but his poetry, his literary criticism, and the less well known dramatic works, such as the incomplete pastoral The Sad Shepherd and the two historical tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, were also the subject of lively interest and debate.

The main body of Lockwood's book charts Jonson's reception in three areas of Romantic cultural life, looking at the theatrical, the critical, and the editorial history of the plays and poetry. Lockwood finds that on the stage there was a 'solid, if unremarkable, pattern of regular revivals' of Jonson's 'major' comedies (p. 50). He examines the popularity of the Garrick production of Every Man In His Humour, the mixed successes of the later Kemble and Kean productions of that play, and the controversial 1776 revival of Epicoene starring Sarah Siddons as the eponymous 'silent woman'. He discusses the influence of Epicoene upon eighteenth-century comedy, and the connections that were commonly made at the time between Jonson's art and the drawings of Hogarth. He also points out how Jonson's characters remained familiar enough in the popular mind for Sheridan, in 1783, to...