Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater by John Gordon Sweeney III (review)

Reviews275 encourages projecting onto a dramatic text nuances and subtleties that actually do not make for good drama, as H. D. F. Kitto demonstrated in his response to John Dover Wilson's over-ingenious What Happens in 'Hamlet.' When the text's intention is limited in scope, as with Pinero's and Pinter's plays, Quigley quite masterfully teases out its possible implications . When the text clearly discourages this form of moral/ psychological subtlety, as with A Dream Play and The Chairs, he is able to respond imaginatively to the scenic and theatrical metaphors which the dramatists employ. It is when he is confronted with the major, multilayered , but deeply committed dramatic work of Ibsen, Brecht, and Beckett that the searching for ambiguity seems an evasion of the works' disquieting terms. Quigley's book, however, will provoke debate and fresh thinking on the subject, and any book on drama that does that is to be commended. BRIAN JOHNSTON Carnegie Mellon University John Gordon Sweeney III. Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. 243. $25.00. This book's subject—Ben Jonson's relationship (and conflict) with his theater audiences—is one that must interest all students of Jonson. As Professor Sweeney states, and as every reader of this playwright can't help but observe, "Jonson was extraordinarily self-conscious about his role as a man of the theater engaged in making a place for drama in English society." Starting from that observation, Sweeney sets out to "consider how . . . [Jonson's] plays, particularly those from Every Man Out of His Humor through Bartholomew Fair, deal with their audiences and how the relationship between stage and gallery determines the nature of the theater" (pp. 7-8). The ensuing study conforms only superficially to the commonly seen pattern of progression from Asper's assault on the audience of Every Man Out to the author's genial and accommodating contract with the audience of Bartholomew Fair. Though Sweeney argues, in line with this pattern, that Jonson's "commitment to the stage changed radically" in this fifteen-year period "largely . . . because he mastered certain conflicts inherent in his sense of theater by repeatedly enacting them on the stage" (p. 8), he also insists (correctly, I believe) on an ambivalence that underlies Jonson's earlier and later stances alike, and maintains that the overt attitudes professed in the various appendages to the plays cannot simply be taken at face value. Resolution to the inherent conflict between the poet's roles as instructive reformer and successful entertainer was especially complicated for Jonson not only because "his playhouse audience revealed itself as a beastly group," but also because "he found the role of the poet" in the classical tradition, "as he had idealized it, stifling" (p. 48). And, when it comes, the concessive resolution of Bartholomew Fair is actually Jonson's strategy for putting some necessary "distance between himself and his theater. . . . This reconciliation is contingent upon qualified rejection; geniality goes hand in hand with contempt. Behind the mask, Jonson was writing himself out of a theater which he had come to regard as the realm of fools" (p. 177). 276Comparative Drama A study of "the relationship between stage and gallery" that does more than summarize Jonson's professed attitudes could, of course, take various approaches toward various ends. The focal term in this book's title is "psychology." Its primary "critical language" is that of psychoanalysis , and it is interested in the plays above all as "a fascinating record of an artist's struggle to define himself through, and against, his audience" (p. 214). Since I am not qualified to assess the validity of Sweeney's psychoanalytic argument as such, I will simply record its conclusions and then comment briefly on what seem to me to be its merits and limitations as a critical analysis of Jonson's plays. In sum, "the plays from Every Man Out through Bartholomew Fair develop the [oedipal] conflicts in a way that uncannily recapitulates the historical development of the individual human personality" (p. 215). Sweeney does not, however, reduce Jonson to a Freudian Every-Oedipus: "Jonson sensed with fascination and horror that the extremes lay...