Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage by Robert C. Evans (review)

86Comparative Drama tinental, and even British, cousins." In fact, Adler's categories and his approach obscure what is both characteristically "political" and most daringly critical about many, perhaps the majority, of the Pulitzer plays. American drama, like the American people, is not very political in the narrow sense. We distrust politicians, who in turn shake their heads sorrowfully over how many of us stay home on election day. But in a broader sense American plays are intensely political, even "ideological." We fail to notice this American ideology because we tend to take it for granted—it's the air we breathe—and because it is characteristically the most unsystematic and anti-ideological of ideologies: anarchism. Centering, perhaps, on Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's overtly anarchic You Can't Take It With You (the 1937 winner), and ranging from O'Neill's "Anna Christie" (1922) and Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1925) to Lanford Wilson's" Talley's Folly (1980), Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart (1981 ), and Marsha Norman's "night, Mother (1982), American Pulitzer prize drama is filled with the struggles of more or less rugged individuals to shake themselves loose from institutional and conventional tyranny at almost any cost. The basic doctrine embodied in these diverse instances is simple: to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, the archetypal American anarchist, "That authority is best which is not authoritarian at all, and when we are prepared for it that will be the kind of authority which we will have." Finally, if the awards are truly an index to the "nature and development" of American drama, and if anarchism is a pervasive theme, then we might legitimately expect the all-time winners of the Pulitzer popularity contest, O'Neill and Sherwood, to show marked anarchist tendencies. And they do—both in their prize plays and elsewhere in their work. My quarrel with Adler's book as a "mirror" of the American stage springs from my admiration for its virtues: suggestive, allusive, scattershot in his approach. Adler hits the target often enough to stimulate a re-examination of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as an American institution and an index to American values. But he stops short; he does only half the job. The Pulitzer plays are more variously and often more subtly subversive than Adler perceives. TOM SMALL Western Michigan University Robert C. Evans. Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989. Pp. 334. $45.00. Robert Evans considers Ben Jonson "a writer whose life and works were radically conditioned by a culture rooted in hierarchical relations" (p. 9). Thus Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage opens by examining the patronage transaction in Renaissance England: a pervasive cultural system, patronage controlled all of one's life, extending beyond the arts to domestic and political arenas also. Culture seemed inevitably patriarchal and hierarchical; a man's chief relationships were vertical: to his patron (whether an aristocratic sponsor or a father) and to subordinates (whether his clients or his wife and children). Even horizontal relations such as friendships were enmeshed in the patronage Reviews87 matrix. Viewing the culture this way demands a critical approach that examines Jonson's poems "as micropolitical acts or performances. And it would attempt to show how the complexities, ambiguities, and tensions inherent in the patronage system could be reflected in the minute characteristics and aesthetic strategies of particular works" (p. 30). Evans describes these forces in Jonson's poems; he also surveys the peculiar ethical and aesthetic problems that a patronage poet must face. The book explores Jonson's relationships, as expressed in his work, to his patrons, rivals, and friends. Because Jonson's poems are "poised between idealism and pragmatism, morality and force, they exhibit tensions between spontaneity and art, compulsion and calculation, improvisation and design" (p. 106). Chapter Four on patrons is the strongest of these chapters, partly because of the book's central assumption; a patronage system implies a context of competition that makes distinguishing rivals and friends difficult. Nonetheless, Evans's comments on Jonson's friendship poems provide a useful counter-point to the misconception of Jonson as a man unloved and unlovable...