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Humanist Schooling and Ben Jonson's Poetaster

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 73; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.2006.0005

1080-6547

Julian Koslow,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Humanist Schooling and Ben Jonson's Poetaster Julian Koslow Ben Jonson has long been seen as the playwright for whom the theater was at once too real and yet not quite real enough—who wanted to escape from the stage's hurly-burly world of material flux to print culture's cool, static world of enduring ideality. Yet his early play, Poetaster, shows the extent to which the reality of the theater was in fact absolutely vital to Jonson's conception of how his printed poetry and plays were to function in society—and how vital embodiment remained to the vision of poetry's transcendently disembodied power instilled in Jonson by his humanist education. Poetaster is rarely considered central to Jonson's accomplishment in terms of dramatic craft. But this play nevertheless possesses a rich programmatic significance which should enable us to grasp better how Jonson's engagement with the stage complemented and brought to the surface the inherent theatricality in the humanist pedagogy by which he was taught and after which he modeled his own interactions with his audience. Concerning the establishment of The Theater by James Burbage in 1576, Stephen Orgel has written that "[a]ll at once the theater was an institution, a property, a corporation. For the first time in more than a thousand years it had the sort of reality that meant most to Renaissance society: it was real in the way that 'real estate' is real; it was a location, a building, a possession—an established and visible part of society."1 Poetaster demonstrates Jonson's appreciation for the way that the theater, by virtue of its ability to give his texts a physical—visual, aural, gestural, embodied—life, could help him manifest the pedagogical power promised to poets by humanism with something like the same ontological force as those visibly embodied forms of power and authority which were most significant in early modern social life. It was one thing to be able to assert a transcendent social power greater even than that of the monarch (something Jonson actually does in the concluding act of Poetaster); after all, poets often claimed to produce cultural artifacts more powerful than [End Page 119] marble or gilded monuments. But it was another thing altogether to show the poet many hundreds of years after the death of his body, alive again and speaking his own words, haunting the bodies, as well as the mouths, the ears, and the minds, of another age. But this is exactly what Jonson does in Poetaster when he brings Ovid, Virgil, and Horace onstage as featured characters. Of course, Jonson has always been known as a dualist, a poet who valorizes the disincarnate ideality of language over merely material forms of social being. Yet, while Jonson's dualism is clearly a central feature of his poetics, Jonson was also a poet who was acutely aware of the mediations upon which his dualism depended in practice. Perhaps nowhere in Jonson's writings is there a scene which better dramatizes how complex and peculiar was the relation Jonson imagined between words and bodies than the final scene of Poetaster, in which Horace, Jonson's ancient Roman alter-ego, administers an emetic to Crispinus (representing Jonson's rival playwright, John Marston), and, in front of the emperor and his court, the unfortunate man is made to vomit a bowl full of his own bad language. The words in Crispinus-Marston's vocabulary to which Horace-Jonson objects drop into a basin from which Horace reads them aloud. CRISPINUS. O, I am sick— HORACE. A basin, a basin, quickly; our physic works. [To Crispinus] Faint not, man. [Horace holds a basin into which Crispinus appears to vomit his words.] CRISPINUS. O-retrograde—reciprocal—incubus. CAESAR. What's that Horace? HORACE. [Looking in the basin] Retrograde, reciprocal and incubus are come up. GALLUS. Thanks be to Jupiter. CRISPINUS. O—glibbery—lubrical—defunct—O— HORACE. Well said! Here's some store. VIRGIL. What are they? HORACE. [Looking] Glibbery, lubrical and defunct.2 The purge continues for more than forty lines (469–515), and another 24 words or so—"Prorumped? What a noise it made! As if his spirit would...