Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies by Robert N. Watson (review)

Reviews373 (1930), and To Find Oneself (1932). He sees the first two plays as "treatments of relativity and the fictions of the spirit." Six Characters is about living in a state of suspension "between the impulse to have form and theatrical form itself." Similarly concerned with theatricality and relativity are Each in His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise, while As You Desire Me and To Find Oneself are "late treatments of selfcreation ." But most valuable is the coherence which Caputi's analyses bring to the totality of Pirandello's work as critic, fiction writer, and playwright and to his disagreements with Benedetto Croce. Rather than assume the mark of phenomenology's obsessive, semi-conscious preoccupations, these concerns reflect the rational approach of the writings to umorismo. "Seeking that modicum of clarity and coherence remaining to one for whom sincerità had become a last standard," Pirandello finds life "tragic" in its necessary obedience to movement and form in "perpetual, mortal succession" and unresolved, "continuous conflict." "Self-creation could wrest fugitive unities and coherences from the flux, but it could not alter the continuously volatile nature of the process." Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness is a worthy successor to Caputi's earlier John Marston, Satirist (1961) and Buffo, the Genius of Vulgar Comedy (1978). JEROME MAZZARO State University of New York at Buffalo Robert N. Watson. Ben Jonson's Parodie Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. 269. $25.00. As I came to the end of Robert Watson's study of Jonson's comedies, it struck me that Jonson has been fortunate in his commentators over the last thirty years or so. From studies by John J. Enck (Jonson and the Comic Truth, 1957), Edward B. Partridge (The Broken Compass, 1958), and Jonas Barish (Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, 1960) up through more recent works by L. A. Beaurline, Alexander Leggatt, and Anne Barton, Shakespeare's chief rival has benefitted from thoughtful and wonderfully varied critical attention. Indeed, the writers just cited may stand for many others—editors and historians as well as critics and scholars—who have made Jonson more accessible and who cast new light on his literary and theatrical achievement. Further evidence of the playwright 's good fortune appears in the continuing utility of much that has been written about him. Few of the major critical assessments are so narrow or so thesis-ridden that they have merely provided targets for a subsequent generation of revisionists or debunkers. Perhaps something in Jonson's own manner encourages such careful and balanced responses; perhaps the clarity of his own comic writing inhibits aberrant critical reactions. However one explains this happy situation in Jonson studies, it seems clear that Professor Watson's excellent book locates itself comfortably within Üiat situation and at the same time exploits it to good effect. Ben Jonson's Parodie Strategy teaches us new ways of understanding Jonson 374Comparative Drama without ever dismissing old views directly or ungenerously. At the same time, the book's practice is perfectly consonant with its subtitle, Literary Imperialism in the Comedies, in employing a sort of critical imperialism in its approach to earlier readings of the plays. Rather than attacking earlier theories head on, stressing their supposed inadequacies or emphasizing their errors, Watson gently "de-centers" them, moving them aside with deft and gracious consideration in order to allow his own theory to take center stage. While this is not quite what he means when he speaks of Jonson's "literary imperialism," it is close enough to allow us to believe that the strategy is a conscious one, adopted to allow the modern critic to employ a scheme for conquest put to such skillful use by his Renaissance precursor . And it is right to think of Jonson as a figure in critical history in this context, for it is Jonson as critic (and theater historian) who is the central subject here as much as Ben Jonson, playwright. This is so not merely because his parodie strategy "anticipates several of the insights of contemporary critical theory," making him "in effect, a reader-response theorist" or in some "more...