Ben Jonson and the Boy Company Tradition

JEMCS 3.1 (Spring/Summer 2003) Ben Jonson and the Boy Company Tradition Jeanne H. McCarthy All treatises on the Elizabethan stage must be acknowledged to be imperfect and temporary ...1 Ben Jonson remains one of the more compelling person alities to emerge in the early modern drama and in the history of the playing companies. The idea that he was an innovator, even inventor, of several literary practices in the early modern period is, after all, a pervasive one in contem porary criticism. In his extraordinarily useful biography of the playwright-poet, for instance, David Riggs credits Jonson with introducing, virtually single-handedly, the concept of the individual author into the English literary tradition: Jonson's career marks the emergence of this notion within the history of English literature. The codes of reading that he incorporated in his literary works are but a single aspect of his prolonged, and astonishingly suc cessful, effort to establish a proprietary claim to his own writings. . . .Recall his pioneering attempts to gain con trol of the scripts he sold to the acting companies; his equally unprecedented supervision of the printing of his plays; the elaborate and innovative process of canon-for mation that led to the publication of his authorized Works; his inscriptions of his own name into his poems and plays; his projection of his own values onto his patrons; his notorious quarrel with Jones over the authorship of the masques that they prepared together; 2 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and, finally, his sponsorship of a coterie of "sons" who reaffirmed their adoptive father's interpretation of his own works. (352) Like his predecessors, Riggs struggles to reconcile the impressive list of artistic achievements attributed to Jonson throughout his career?and the image he fashioned for him self as an elite, scholarly poet?with seemingly incongruent stories of the author's imprisonments by censors and his entanglements with the law, as well as his sometimes violent conflicts with contemporary actors and authors. Certainly, conflicts with censors and authorities have tended to receive a great deal of attention,2 and they do indeed seem to mark Jonson's colorful biography. He ran into trouble with the censor (bywhom he was occasionally imprisoned) for insults that seemed to undermine the authority of monarchs or their policies: Jonson was "sum moned before the Privy Council" for Sej?nus in 1603, and both he and his collaborator George Chapman spent several months in jail after they managed to offend the court in Eastward Ho! (1605), while their remaining co-conspirator and collaborator, John Marston, happened to escape to the countryside. Similarly, Poetaster (1601), The Demi Is an Ass (1616), and The Magnetic Lady (1632) all drew some notice by the authorities (Herford, et al. 11:253). This was the same Ben Jonson who nearly lost his life to the hangman early in his career for his murder of Gabriel Spencer, a member of Phillip Henslowe's Admiral's Men (whom he killed in a duel in 1598 in the vicinity of the Curtain, the theater in which his play Every Man In His Humor was being performed), the murder being prompted by an issue lost to history but per haps connected with their mutual imprisonment for the ear lier, now lost play, The Isle ofDogs, which had also incensed the Privy Council and City authorities (Rutter 116, 150). In this episode, Jonson's escape from the gallows had been enabled only by his reliance on the benefit of clergy, that is, by proving he could read the Latin "neck verse" (150). Literacy seems, in short, to have brought Jonson both power and trouble. In fact, Jonson's history of violence and run-ins with the law would seem to make him, as Riggs himself finds, an McCarthy 3 especially apt test case for a Foucauldian interpretation of authorship. While Michel Foucault's work on authorship, discipline, subjects, and states involves a complex elabora tion and reworking of his critical terms and position, in prac tice, applications of his theory on authorship tend to be informed primarily by specific claims. Thus, Foucault's ini tial attempt to deflect attention from a "liberal humanist" conception...