Our Scene Is London Ben Jonson S City and The Space of The Author 1st Edition James D. Mardock Ready To Read
Our Scene Is London Ben Jonson S City and The Space of The Author 1st Edition James D. Mardock Ready To Read
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Studies in Major
Literary Authors
Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A Routledge Series
Studies in Major Literary Authors
William E. Cain, General Editor
James D. Mardock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now know or hereafter invented, including photo-
copying and recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Chapter One
Space as Authorial Strategy 6
Chapter Two
Londinium: The 1604 Royal Entry of James I 23
Chapter Three
London on Stage, London as Stage 45
Chapter Four
Jonson’s Plague Year Plays 67
Chapter Five
“Practisers of their madnesse”:
Bartholomew Fair and the Space of the Author 95
Epilogue
Beyond the 1616 Folio 110
Notes 117
Bibliography 147
Index 157
vii
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
“Our scene is London,” proclaims the prologue to Ben Jonson’s The Alche-
mist, “‘cause we would make known, / No country’s mirth is better than our
own” (Prologue 5–6). While ironically undercut by its cheerfully amoral
attitude toward the subject matter that the early modern English metropolis
provides—“your whore, / Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more” (7–
8)—the literary jingoism of these lines is not completely disingenuous. The
London scene is crucial to Jonson’s career-spanning project of self-celebra-
tion, self-promotion, and self-fashioning. In examining Jonson’s uses and rep-
resentations of London, its places and its spaces, I participate in an ongoing
and vigorous response to Steven Mullaney’s call, nearly two decades ago, for
a rhetoric of space in early modern London, and in the critical examination
of the drama’s role in producing that rhetoric.2 The last four years alone have
seen excellent studies—by Andrew Hiscock, Russell West, Henry Turner,
and Jean Howard, to name a few—exploring the intersections between Lon-
don’s urbanization, changes in the early modern spatial paradigm, cartogra-
phy and other practical spatial arts, and English dramatic practices. My own
book will argue not only that Jonson’s representational engagements with
the city of London potently shaped the early-modern urban experience, but
that his consciously theatrical authoring of the city aided the emergence a
new authorial subjectivity, a new idea of the author.
Most recent studies of the development of early modern dramatic
authorship have focused on textual, not theatrical matters: on authorial nego-
tiations with readership, apparatuses of state and religious censorship, systems
of patronage, and the market for books. Douglas A. Brooks, for example,
building on the work of bibliographers including Richard C. Newton and
1
2 Our Scene is London
rapid physical expansion made the city less easy to know in its
entirety—“know” not just in the sense of having familiarity with the
streets and buildings of various districts but also in the sense of having
a conceptual image of the activities imagined to characterize these new
areas and the kinds of people who inhabited them.9
In this context, the writers of Jacobean London were largely concerned with
defining what it meant to live in (and rule over) the newly “British” capital.
Significantly, Jacobean London also brought an effective end to the tra-
dition of touring theater in England, already declining late in Elizabeth’s
reign, as playing companies became a primarily and almost exclusively
urban phenomenon. London’s dramatic poets advanced the development of
the theater business under the city’s occasionally hostile regulatory author-
ity, but they also wrote plays for citizen audiences and devised entertain-
ments for the civic government. The establishment of permanent urban
playhouses and the accompanying explosion of dramatic production helped
form a response to the new English urban experience, providing a mode of
representation based on the individual’s experience of the spatial environ-
ment as a form of interpretation.10
In other modes of literature, the author’s processes can arguably be
divorced from the personal or sociopolitical processes of place-making, but
place and space are integral to the production of drama, since for the dra-
matist meaning is achieved in part through bodies in space. The practices
4 Our Scene is London
of place and space, that is, form for dramatic authors a syntax and vocabu-
lary as important as those of language. Moreover, the conventions of stages
both public and private in early modern London—bare of all but the most
portable scenery, with setting entirely established by dialogue—foreground
the role of the individual in producing and interpreting space.11 The envi-
ronmental poetics that emerged from Jonson’s employment of and reflection
on the dramatist’s potential to shape space—not only the space of the stage,
but the space of the city—deserves consideration alongside textual and
material factors in the development of authorship.
With this in mind, I trace Jonson’s career from 1604 to 1616, dem-
onstrating the ways in which Jonson consistently asserted his authorial
identity by foregrounding drama’s power to represent space, a project that
ran alongside, if sometimes seemingly at odds with, the concern with tex-
tual self-monumentalization that culminated in the Folio. My first chapter
demonstrates how intricately these two strategies could be related, and also
illustrates Jonson’s lifelong interest in spatial poetics, even in non-dramatic
poetry like the scatological mock epic “On the Famous Voyage.” Chapter
two turns to a very different Jonsonian portrait of London, and examines
what I argue was a transitional moment in Jonson’s career, his employment
(along with Thomas Dekker) to produce the pageants celebrating the newly
crowned King James’s royal entry into London in 1604. I argue that from
his competition with Dekker, played out in the matrix of London’s tem-
porary transformation into stage space, Jonson gained an awareness of the
potential for dramatic control over urban space as a tool for the assertion of
authorial agency.
The remainder of the book turns to the representation of London
onstage in Jonson’s London comedies, where, as I argue in chapter three,
individual virtue is shown to be analogous to the character’s mode of inhab-
iting and moving through the space of the city. In the revised Every Man in
His Humor (1605?-1616?) and the collaborative Eastward Ho (1605), Jon-
son established a model of urban cultural competency that depends on one’s
ability to apply a playwright’s representational practices to the city’s places.
When he returned to London comedy after a four-year hiatus following
Eastward Ho, Jonson was able to refine this model further, staging his char-
acters’ own dramaturgical manipulations of urban space in order implic-
itly to foreground his own authorial practices. The subjects of my fourth
chapter, Epicoene (1609) and The Alchemist (1610), two plays written dur-
ing the closure of the playhouses during seventeenth-century London’s lon-
gest-lasting plague visitation, present an implicit competition for dramatic
authority between the characters in his plays and Jonson himself. Finally,
Introduction 5
I turn to Bartholomew Fair (1614), a play omitted from the Folio but cru-
cial to Jonson’s alternate, spatial, authorial strategy. Chapter five reads that
play—in which Jonson implicitly inserts himself into the dramatic fiction
and explicitly into the playhouse itself—as Jonson’s fullest articulation of
spatial authorship and of the potential for considerations of urban and the-
atrical space to express his poetic ideals.
In recognizing the part that space plays in what David Riggs calls
Jonson’s “extraordinary campaign to secure his authorial prerogatives,” I am
not necessarily arguing that that campaign was “successful” in some essen-
tial sense.12 After Wimsatt and Beardsley questioned the relevance of autho-
rial intention, after Barthes wrote the author’s obituary, and after Foucault
replaced him with a function, we may be forever beyond the naïve assump-
tion that claims of authorial agency are ever successful.13 But neither can we
ignore the existence of those claims if we wish to historicize authorship as an
idea. Barthes’s famous declaration of the author’s death was wishful thinking
as much as a statement of what has happened; he acknowledges that “[t]he
author still reigns in histories of literature.”14 And for Foucault, if the histori-
cal author is always in the act of disappearing into the “author function,” he
remains a “necessary or constraining figure.”15 At any rate, my arguments
do not depend on a reactionary reassertion of or submission to the tyranny
of the author, but rather on the view that Jonson’s claims—“successful” or
not—to a privileged role as maker and interpreter of the meanings of Lon-
don expand and color our sense of what counts as text, of what counts as
authorial practice, and of what constitutes an assertion of authorial agency.
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