Ben Jonson’s Social Attitudes: A Statistical Analysis

Ben Jonson’s Social Attitudes: A Statistical Analysis Judith K. Gardiner and Susanna S. Epp By organizing and displaying a large variety of patterns from a set of data, computers help us to see relationships which might otherwise elude us and to draw conclusions based on an entirety of information rather than subjective impressions. Up to now, much valuable computer work in the humanities has been lin­ guistic. In this study, we assay another approach toward com­ puter-aided study of literature, an approach currently more typi­ cal of the social sciences. This study seeks to use statistical analy­ sis to describe some characteristics of a certain literary world— the comedies and poems of Ben Jonson—and to infer from them Jonson’s attitudes toward people of varying social class and of both sexes. The relationships between these attitudes and the genres of works in which the characters appear are explored, as are the changes of these attitudes over time. Ben Jonson was a gentleman’s grandson and a bricklayer’s stepson who saw himself as a child of the Muses and an heir of the great Latin poets.1During the “War of the Theaters,” Jonson had one of his characters, a hack playwright representing Jon­ son’s enemies, explain that he slandered “Horace,” representing Jonson, only because “he keepes gallants company” and “better company (for the most part) then I.”2 Jonson enjoyed the patronage and sometimes even the friendship of aristocracy and royalty, yet he boasted of his independent attitude to the titled class. Drummond of Hawthomden recorded as one of “his Nar­ rations” that Jonson “never esteemed of a man for the name of a Lord.”3 Jonson has a significant reputation as a realistic social com­ mentator who developed contemporary dramatic satire or “city 68 Judith K. Gardiner & Susanna S. Epp 69 comedy” in Elizabethan London.4 L. C. Knights’ well-known study, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, documents that Jonson reflects his urban surroundings and posits that Jonson exhibits typically conservative, anti-acquisitive Jacobean atti­ tudes.5 Jonson’s poetry, too, is known for its social qualities, though in a different sense from his plays. It too mirrors a distinct social milieu.6 Much of Jonson’s non-dramatic poetry was writ­ ten for specific persons on specific occasions: for example, he wrote epitaphs for tombstones, verse thank-you letters, poems to be inscribed on gifts of silver plate, begging poems, and invec­ tives against personal enemies. The majority of his satiric poetry is vivid and specific, though directed against contemporary types, he claims, rather than against contemporary individuals. For these reasons, Jonson’s work has long been used as a major source for Renaissance social attitudes by literary historians, and Jonson’s social attitudes have attracted wide critical interest as a subject in themselves. I Goals and Methods. The starting point for our study was the belief that Jonson dissociated himself from the class of London citizens with whom he worked, and instead identified himself as a “gentleman.” Therefore, we believed that Jonson’s attitude to­ ward his characters would prove dependent on their social class and would be more favorable to the gentry than to the common­ ers. More generally, we wished to describe Jonson’s social atti­ tudes more clearly and precisely than had previously been done. For this purpose, we used a computer-aided statistical analysis. We coded 442 characters appearing in Jonson’s comedies and poems for their social status and sex. We classified Jonson’s atti­ tude toward the characters as “positive” or “negative,” and we also coded the characters on the basis of whether they appeared in a comedy or a poem, whether in an earlier or a later work. The computer was used to organize this mass of data— 442 characters classified for five characteristics—into coherent tables which could be studied both from a descriptive statistical point of view and, where appropriate, as sample data from which infer­ ences could be drawn. For purposes of inductive statistics we viewed these 442 characters as a sample of the theoretical set of all characters Jonson might have created. We drew conclusions, 70 Comparative Drama then...