Contemporary Contexts of Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass

Contemporary Contexts of Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass Robert C. Evans Ben Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass is not one of his bestknown plays, but in many respects it is one of his most interesting . Written in 1616, the same year in which Jonson received a royal pension and witnessed the publication of his massive first folio, the play was produced at a time when its author must have seemed near the height of his public career. Although the work has rarely been judged a complete artistic success, it has hardly been considered a total failure. Instead, critical assessments have usually been mixed, with many readers acknowledging the play's genuine strengths. Anne Barton, in fact, has recently called it "an immensely courageous play, far better and more interesting than most of its critics have made out"; she sees it as both a summation and a new departure in Jonson's development as a dramatist. 1 Her discussion invites new attention to the play's aesthetic success, but our understanding of the work can also profit from a renewed examination of its place in history, of the ways it at once is embedded in and emerges from specific historical contexts. Leah Marcus has recently gone far towards helping us to understand those contexts,2 yet a wealth of further evidence links the work to contemporary personalities, issues, events, and texts that have yet to be fully explored. Examining this evidence will reveal how tightly the play can be tied to its own time and place and thus how many resonances it may have had for its original audience. Reading the play with a fuller awareness of its historical dimensions can heighten rather than reduce our sense of its artistry and complexity. Moreover, the test case which ROBERT C. EVANS, Associate Professor at Auburn University in Montgomery, is the author of Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage and, most recently, of Jonson, Lipsius, and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism. 140 Robert C. Evans141 the play provides may suggest the need to re-examine many of Jonson's other works with renewed attention to their historical contexts. Jonson's comedy was first staged in the fall of 1616, probably in October or November; it seems to have been written sometime during the preceding several months.3 This dating is crucial and crucially helpful, for 1616 was an especially momentous year in Jacobean history. The political situation was unusually fluid at this time: King James' old favorite, the Scotsman Robert Carr (Earl of Somerset), had recently been convicted for his role in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury— the greatest scandal of the reign. Meanwhile the new favorite, the Englishman George Villiers, had yet to establish firmly his independent power. The opportunities for factional competition and intrigue, especially those tinged by ethnic prejudices, were thus particularly abundant. The Earl of Pembroke, one of Jonson's most important patrons, had only recently succeeded the disgraced Carr as Lord Chamberlain, and Pembroke was known for his antagonism toward the Scots. However, domestic British politics was not the only focus of contention. Rumors abounded of a planned Spanish match for the young Prince Charles—a marriage and a policy strongly opposed by many powerful people (such as Pembroke) but strongly supported by others, including many courtiers who were on the Spanish payroll. King James' own intentions regarding the possible match were, as usual, somewhat mysterious—a fact that could only exacerbate uncertainty and tensions. This very fluidity meant that a play seeking to influence current events or to contribute to contemporary dialogue could hardly have been written at a more propitious moment. As if all this were not enough, 1616 was also a time of great conflict between competing legal philosophies and between competing courts and jurists, the latter most notably including the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, and the Lord Chancellor , Sir Thomas Egerton. The King's sympathies were clearly with Egerton, and the monarch's 1616 speech in the Star Chamber in which he enunciated quite clearly his own thinking about the law was one of the most important pronouncements of his reign. Yet while Coke's power...