Wasting Time in Ben Jonson's Epicoene

[T]ime," declares Truewit in Epicoene's opening scene, "because it is an incorporeall thing, and not subiect to sense, we mocke ourselues the fineliest out of it."¹ For all its incorporeality, though, time is of the utmost importance for Epicoene and Jonson's poetics generally. Time anchors the conceptualization of the proper relationship between nature and art at the center of Jonson's neoclassical poetics. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson does not oppose his art to a "Devouring time" from whose rival pen he seeks to rescue the objects of his poetry.² In both his epideictic poetry and his satire, Jonson seeks mimetically not to rival but to imitate time. Jonson's poetry of praise and those whom Jonson praises imitate an idealized and patriarchal version of natural time: cyclical yet productive, natural time balances stasis and change to provoke awareness and acceptance of temporal finitude. Jonson directs his satire against those who through various arts-from poetry to cosmetics-seek to escape natural time for other, artificial and effeminizing temporal horizons characterized by disruption, sterility and waste. Epicoene is an extended and complex example of such satire. Its fictional world is a consumer society in which what is ultimately consumed is time; the satiric selves who inhabit this fictional world do not imitate but deny nature and natural time, fashioning themselves through a poesis that runs away from nature to occupy an artificial temporal horizon constituted by the wasteful and seemingly sterile pleasures of capitalism. The force of the play's satire depends upon the idealized conception of natural time underpinning Jonson's notions of ideal selves and poetics. In the play's fictional world, however, the urban realities of capitalism and the plague have radically reshaped the natural and artificial temporal horizons of the characters' existence, cutting them loose from their moorings in natural time. Consequently, the play loses its satirical force and points instead to the relativity of ideal Jonsonian selves and poetics: in the urban world of early modern London, such selves and poetics are neither necessary nor possible.

In order to understand the importance of time to Jonson's neoclassicism, it is necessary to clarify at the outset that mimesis for Jonson involves more than merely copying nature. Certainly, for Jonson true art is grounded in and constrained by nature. Poets are artificers, and "[t]he true Artificer will not run away from nature, as hee were afraid of her; or depart from life, and the likenesse of Truth" (Discoveries, 772-74).³ For Jonson no less than Sidney, however, the poet is "a Maker," not a copier.⁴ "Poet neuer credit gain'd / By writing truths, but things (like truths) well fain'd" (9-10), Jonson asserts in the second prologue to Epicoene. "Likenesse" here cannot, as Martin Elsky suggests, simply be equated with "empirical accuracy."⁵ Nonetheless, the notion of verisimilitude that Jonson voices in these lines retreats from the radical implications of Sidney's assertion that "the Poet, disdeining to be tied to any such subjection [to nature], lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into an other nature: in making things either better than nature bringeth foorth, or, quite a new, formes such as never were in nature: as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chymeras, Furies, and such like" (8).⁶ Jonson frees the feigning of art from subjection to nature only in order to subject art to nature at the level of art's structuring principles, one of which is time. Although not the truth, art must ensure that it is like the truth by obeying the "needfull rule[s]," such as "[t]he lawes of time, place, persons" and action, by which the unified and ultimately rational structure of nature is transposed into the structure of the poetic artifact.⁷ The heterogeneous chimera, like the "Seruant-monster," can have no place in Jonsonian poetics.⁸ Jonson does not consider art to be merely the reflection of nature, however. Although "without Nature, art can clayme no being," "without Art, Nature can ne're bee perfect" (Discoveries 2504, 2503). Art...