'Other Men's Provision': Ben Jonson's Parody of Robert White in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue

'Other Men's Provision': Ben Jonson's Parody of Robert White in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue Robert C. Evans Ben Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue is now regarded as one of his most sophisticated and accomplished masques, which is why the reception that greeted its original performance has always seemed somewhat puzzling. Various evidence suggests that its first audience—including King James—found the masque dull and disappointing. Further, although Jonson himself claimed that the work was well received, he quickly dropped the whole first section and improvised a new antimasque for a revised version of the work entitled For the Honour of Wales? Different explanations that have been offered for the poor reception accorded the original masque include the audience's inability to appreciate the innovative nature of its design as well as their possible offense at the masque's satirical implications , particularly its satire of courtly self-indulgence.2 However, contemporary evidence that has received insufficient attention throws an entirely new light on the masque, not only helping to explain its genesis but perhaps also providing new insight into the reasons for its poor reception. That evidence is embodied in a masque by Robert White entitled Cupid's Banishment, which was performed only months before the first staging of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. Peter Walls long ago noted briefly the resemblances between the antimasques of the two works, but in fact the similarities between White's masque and Jonson's are far more striking and pervasive than Walls' short note could indicate.3 In fact, it ROBERT C. EVANS is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University in Montgomery. He is the author of Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage and of a number of forthcoming publications on Jonson and other Renaissance figures. 55 56Comparative Drama seems undeniable that Jonson's work was intended as a conscious and deliberate response to Cupid's Banishment, and that the motives behind Jonson's invention may have had as much to do with micropolitical rivalry as with the larger political issues that have recently been stressed in commentary on Pleasure Reconciled. A strong cirumstantial case can be built to suggest that Jonson may have felt significantly threatened by (or at the very least significant disdain for) White's masquewriting , and that Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue was conceived partly as an attempt to beat White—and beat him publicly—at his own game. The similarities between the two masques—in their characters, their themes, their stagings, their structures, and their over-all designs—are remarkable and would have been readily apparent to the many courtiers and other prominent people who must have witnessed both performances. As I shall suggest, Jonson's masque may have been badly received partly because the resemblances between the two works were too obvious , so that he may have seemed to be usurping an important court occasion to score personal points against a private competitor . Evidence from other periods of Jonson's career suggests his willingness to use masques to attack his rivals, and other evidence indicates that Jonson's attacks on other artists were not particularly appreciated by the Stuart kings and their courts. Cupid's Banishment was performed on 4 May 1617 at Ladies Hall in Deptford, a girls' school not far from the royal palace at Greenwich, where Queen Anne spent much of her time.4 The Queen was building a new residence there, and another of Jonson's rivals, Inigo Jones, had been commissioned to design it and to supervise its construction.5 Thus Jonson may have had more than one reason to feel some discomfort with the Queen's recent patronage of other artists. For Anne was present at the performance of Cupid's Banishment, and indeed White paid her special honor near the work's conclusion, in which two of her goddaughters (performers in the masque and apparently students at Ladies Hall) presented her with needlework gifts emblazoned with her initials. Anne, of course, had always been one of the prime patrons of masques at court and had taken an active interest in commissioning, staging, and dancing in them. It was she who more than a decade earlier had witnessed...