Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind by Katherine Eisaman Maus (review)

1 80Comparative Drama after all, many different kinds of translation; when a play is successfully translated for performance in another language, it necessarily aims for speakability and credibility rather than for mere rigid correctness. Everyman is a work of genius in this regard, and its pioneering effort to bring Dutch dramatic innovations to the English stage has at last been followed up in our own century with Neville Denny's widely-performed 1972 translation of TAe Blessed Apple Tree and with others which have come after it. The emerging truth is that the Dutch plays in the Rederijker tradition were in many cases far more sophisticated and advanced in their dramaturgy than those of their English and continental contemporaries, and are eminently stageworthy to this day. Indeed it seems likely that generations of stage directors of the English Everyman will be among the most grateful of Conley's readers, for they will find in the carefully-translated text of Elckerlijc all manner of visual and vocal clues to the meaning of the English play—and even a few lines and moments worth appropriating into the English text. In this, and in so many ways previously enumerated, this volume is not merely a welcome addition to Elckerlijc-Everyman scholarship but also a model text of the process of comparative drama.1 ROBERT POTTER University of California, Santa Barbara NOTE 1 1 am indebted to Elsa Strietman of Cambridge University for assistance with this review, which could not have been written without her collaboration. Katherine Eisaman Maus. Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. ix + 212. $26.50. Katherine Maus has written a provocative book about the use Ben Jonson made of classical philosophy. She argues that Jonson's favorite classical authors—Seneca, Horace, Tacitus, Cicero, Juvenal, and Quintilian (p. 3)—were appreciative of and sympathetic to Stoicism (p. 15), and that Jonson based his art on their Stoical attitudes. As his understanding of that doctrine changed, so did his work, which Maus thinks falls into three phases. His early plays are satiric comedies with a virtuous protagonist, a Stoic hero. From 1605 to 1616 Jonson abandons the virtuous protagonist and makes ethical and aesthetic compromises. From 1616 until his death, Jonson's interest shifts to romantic lyrics and comedies. Clearly the issue of Stoicism is central to Maus's argument; one must ask, then, whether these writers can be considered Stoics. While Seneca is undoubtedly a late Stoic, Cicero is an Eclectic philosopher, and the others are not associated with any philosophical school. Certainly all endorsed moderation and virtue (hardly an exclusively Stoic position), and like many Romans they were drawn to the pragmatic, homocentric, and cosmopolitan nature of Stoicism. Nonetheless, they felt that Stoicism had its weaknesses, so the label of Stoic will really only do for Seneca. Reviews181 Maus recognizes this problem and refers to the group as the "Roman moralists." However, she insists on linking the moralists to Stoicism, speaking of "the Stoically inclined moralists" (p. 115), the "Stoic notions promulgated by the Roman moralists" (p. 167), "their predecessors, the Greek Stoics" (p. 114), and the moralists' "Stoic phase" (pp. 86, 109), as if the beliefs of six such diverse writers formed a coherent body of thought. If Jonson found the same philosophical beliefs in his favorite Roman writers as Maus does, then those beliefs could have influenced his work as she says they do. However, her insistence that these writers were, in some sense, Stoic and that they shared a consistent outlook may block a reader's acceptance of the book's arguments. Maus makes a good case for the idea that Jonson admired the Roman ideal of a virtuous man, yet she weakens her position by trying to trace that ideal to Stoicism. She argues in her second chapter that Jonson found the Stoic protagonist neither dramatic nor comic. Thus, although Jonson tried to include Stoic protagonists in his early plays, he moved in his middle period to plays in which the Stoic hero is either impotent or absent. Maus thinks that it is "impossible for someone who works with [the Roman moralists'] ethical framework to conceive of a...