Julie Sanders

The Alternative Commonwealth of Women

This chapter re-examines a range of Jonson’s female representations in his numerous stage-worlds, including those in Epicoene (1609), Catiline (1610–11), The Devil is an Ass (1616), a number of the masques commissioned by Queen Anne of Denmark (between 1605 and 1609), and his later Caroline drama. These representations are highly diverse in nature: Jonson’s female characters range from the liberated to the oppressed, and they reside in commonwealths and patriarchies. The chapter seeks to politicize their import, particularly in the way that they function as communities of women, often as alternatives to those communities franchised by conventional and predominantly absolutist politics.

Alternative Societies: The New Inn and the Late Plays

The traditionalist view of Ben Jonson has been that of a theatrical absolutist, of someone who struggled with the inherent heterogeneity of theatre audiences and to control the meanings of his texts. Those meanings have themselves frequently been read as absolutist in their sympathies.1 Jonson’s ‘late’ plays have, however, a particular investment in questions of community, from the fractious dinner-party guests at Lady Loadstone’s house in The Magnetic Lady (1632) to the Sherwood Forest groupings of the unfinished The Sad Shepherd (1637).2 The New Inn (1629) offers a number of theatrical alternatives as well as a vision of an alternative society amidst its alehouse gathering.

The Commonwealth of Paper: Print, News and The Staple of News

The tangible effects of an emerging print culture in the seventeenth century on the availability of news can and have been dated to the 1620s. That decade witnessed the circulation of corantos, news-sheets deriving from the Continent and relating the progress of the European wars; it also saw the transition towards domestically printed newsbooks. Such happenings have been seen as liberating and potentially democratizing in their provision of news for a wider audience. David Norbrook has argued that, in the 1620s There was a significant expansion in the political public sphere … an emergent civil society whose means of communication — reports of parliamentary debates, newsletters, satires, and so on — circulated horizontally, cutting across the vertical power structures emanating from the court.1 In their political and religious bias, however, these same literary productions in print have been viewed as examples of the suscep-tibility of news to contentious issues such as ‘censorship’ and ‘propaganda’. Terms such as these require more thoughtful definition in their application to the early modern period. Both are anachronistic invocations, linguistic projections back from later times.

The Republic in the Fair

The site and situation of the playtext of Bartholomew Fair (1614) have strong implications of community and the communal. To what extent however can we trace a ‘republic’ amidst the booths of Jonson’s fair? Whilst there are inherent problems in associating the ‘real’ Bartholomew Fair with that contained within Jonson’s dramatic representation, the annual Smithfield fair on 24 August in the ever-expanding polis that was early-seventeenth-century London attracted a diverse and populous gathering — diverse in terms of rank, profession, objective, and personality — and that diversity is also a feature of the stage ‘population’ of Jonson’s play. By extension, it might appear logical to see Jonson’s play, like the ‘real’ fair, as representative of popular culture and popular concerns, but these need not necessarily be democratic nor indeed republican (and these two terms as I have been at pains to suggest are not interchangeable).

Local Government and Personal Rule in A Tale of a Tub

The prologue to A Tale of a Tub (c.1633) takes pains to stress that the playtext does not engage with state affairs: No state affairs, nor any politic club, Pretend we in our Tale, here, of a Tub, But acts of clowns and constables today Stuff out the scenes of our ridiculous play. (Prologue, 11. 1–4) But the question must surely be posed whether by emphasizing the absence of allusions of a contemporary, politicized nature, the text does not draw attention to their presence, subversively suggesting the potential for just such topicality on and about ‘state affairs’.1 Martin Butler argues, in a related vein, that the drama’s happy and harmonious ending transcends the social tensions otherwise regis-tered in any given performance, thus consolidating rather than subverting Caroline rule in the 1630s.2 For me, though, the play’s close merely constitutes a theatrical veneer, a ‘happy ending’ that barely conceals the political and social problems revealed elsewhere in the text.

The Commonwealth of Hell: The Devil is an Ass

The Devil is an Ass (1616) is partially a summary of Jonsonian dramatic innovation to date and for that reason links with many past plays are evident: Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair are perhaps the most obvious points of reference. Jonson is providing this summation not as a farewell to theatre but rather as a statement of his theatrical present: ‘such a dramatist am I at this given moment in 1616’. That intense topicality of the play feeds into its political themes and concerns, a number of which have recently been excavated by critics.1 The play touches on contemporary scandals such as the John Darrel trials for false religious exorcisms and the Frances Howard murder trial (through the storyline involving Frances Fitzdottrel — see Chapter 4), and political grievances such as monopolies through the characters of Merecraft and Lady Tailbush. In doing so it touches on particular anxieties about the Jacobean policy of fen drainage, the treatment of which serves to highlight the Jonsonian interest and investment in questions of community which this third section as a whole will explore in Jonson’s later drama.

Saying Something About Venice

Jonson was as meticulous in his Venetian staging of Volpone as in his scholarly appropriation of classical sources for his Roman plays.2 Whilst Volpone may not have had extensive accompanying notes like Sejanus and Catiline, nevertheless it offers a detailed rather than merely impressionistic depiction of the city of Venice at a particular point in its historical and political evolution.

Republicanism and Theatre

Describing the evolution of the city-state in the early modern period, Richard Mackenney has observed that: London could scarcely claim to be a city-state, for it was the seat of a monarchy which in the early seventeenth century aspired to govern by divine right. However, as late as 1617, a Venetian observer — who could be expected to know what a republic was — described the city as ‘a sort of republic of wholesale merchants.’1 The Venetian observer was speaking just seven years after Ben Jonson wrote The Alchemist and unwittingly captures the essence of that play and the central role within it of the London city location.

Conclusion: ‘The End of (T)his Commonwealth Does Not Forget the Beginning’

Ben Jonson was not a republican but he was fiercely involved in a debate over community and communal rights. By now it will be clear the ways in which notions of republicanism in the Jonsonian text and in his ‘theatrical republics’ shade very obviously into notions of community and the communal. Perhaps the plural ‘communities’ would be a more accurate term since Jonson — specifically in his generic variety (poetry, prose, criticism, drama, and masques) — celebrates the vast potential of literature for the production of a multiplicity of meanings.

Roman Frames of Mind

Ancient Rome, republican or otherwise, loomed large in Jonson’s creative and political imagination. Not only was he well-read in the writings stemming from that period, he was committed to scholarly reconstructions of classical Rome for both comic and tragic dramatic purposes. Rome fascinated him as both an aesthetic and political community, providing him with clear paradigms against which to measure his contemporary situation. Jonson used this comparative dynamic in different ways at different times — in alternately ambiguous and precise fashion depending on the context. In his 1601 ‘comicall satire’ Poetaster he explored the aesthetic community or republic of letters of Augustan Rome, creating for dramatic purposes an ahistorical triad of writers vying for the ‘Emperor’s’ favour — Ovid, Horace and Virgil.1 In the later tragedies, Sejanus, His Fall (1603) and Catiline, His Conspiracy (1610–11), he employed Roman, and ostensibly republican, political communities for the purpose of comparison with his own age. This chapter will use the tragedies and a consideration of the source materials they were inspired by to account for this comparative dynamic and these distinctly ‘Roman frames of mind’ in Jonson’s dramatic canon.2