Chapter 1: Shakespeare, Jonson and the Renaissance

Recommended reading

Gurr, Andrew The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) [ISBN 9780521509817]. The best single introduction to the material conditions of the theatre.

Onions, C.T. and R.D. Eagleson (eds) A Shakespeare Glossary. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) [ISBN 978019812521]. Originating in the Oxford English Dictionary project, this gives a definition for every word used by Shakespeare that Onions considers needs explanation. If you do not have an annotated text of a play this glossary is essential. Alternatively, see the reprinted 1975 edition: Onions, C.T. A Shakespeare Glossary (Charleston, South Carolina: Nabu Press, 2010) [ISBN 9781177201957]

Introduction

William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both made their careers in London’s busy theatrical scene during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The work of both men was very popular during their own lifetimes, and they both enjoyed financial success and recognition from their peers in the theatre and at court.

Although you will not need a detailed knowledge of the lives of Shakespeare and Jonson to approach the texts, a brief overview of the careers of the two men shows that they developed very different approaches to drama. This, in turn, affected the kind of plays they produced. You should therefore be able to compare them in this respect.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare enjoys a privileged position in the hierarchy of English literature. He is generally considered to be at the centre of literary achievement in English, and is often referred to as a ‘genius’ or similar, which can confer upon him an almost semi-divine status. The reasoning and cultural developments that have placed him in this elevated position are beyond the scope of this guide, but it is important to have some awareness of the fact that Shakespeare’s privileged position was not asserted during his lifetime, but a product of later responses to his work in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be useful here if you think of Shakespeare simply as a dramatist among the many others working in the theatres at this time, and try to resist any urge that might encourage you to think of his works as ‘better’ than those of anyone else. This is not to denigrate the Shakespearean text at all, but merely to remove any preconceptions you may have and place it in the context that it would have been viewed in at the time of its original performance.

Shakespeare was born on or around 23 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon and died there on the same day in 1616. In the late 1580s he moved to London and entered the theatrical business, first as an actor and then as a dramatist and shareholder in the Globe Theatre. The first printed allusion to Shakespeare dates from 1592 in the pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, where he is referred to as an ‘upstart crow… [who] is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’. The author of this comment, the dramatist and poet Robert Greene, seems to resent Shakespeare as a rival. Interestingly, this is the only contemporary reference that shows any hostility to Shakespeare, as most others speak of his pleasant temperament and quick wit. All other dramatic allusions to Shakespeare made during his time in London are listed in the introduction of Wells and Taylor’s Complete Works.

Most of the documentary evidence of this period of Shakespeare’s life takes the form of official documents, such as contracts and lawsuits. It is clear from these that Shakespeare made a lot of money in London. When he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon he was a very rich man, much of his wealth deriving from lending money at rates of interest beneficial to the lender. This is a biographical fact that has largely been ignored by critics wishing to portray Shakespeare as a natural genius, it being felt that this genius was not compatible with great personal wealth.

Shakespeare’s death is traditionally considered to have been as a result of a fever contracted after a bout of drinking with the poet Michael Drayton and, ironically, Ben Jonson, the latter having something of a fearsome reputation for his capacity for alcohol.

Ben Jonson

Unlike his more lauded colleague, Ben Jonson’s position in the literary canon has not always been so certain. The fortunes of the Jonsonian text have been intermittent, with only a small number of his most popular plays receiving regular productions in the three centuries since his death. This is ironic considering the lengths Jonson went to during his career to assert that poets and playwrights were important artists rather than humble artisans.

Jonson, Shakespeare’s junior by nine years, was born in London early in 1573 and died there on 6 August 1637. The documentary evidence shows that Jonson was involved with a theatrical company called the Lord Admiral’s Men during the 1590s. In the autumn of 1598 Jonson killed one of the actors of this company, Gabriel Spencer, in a duel. Jonson was saved from execution for murder thanks to his ability to read and write Latin, which allowed him to claim what was called the ‘Benefit of Clergy’. This legal device, which rested on a distinction between the jurisdiction of state courts and ecclesiastical courts, exempted the learned from sentencing for a first conviction.

In disgrace with the Lord Admiral’s Men for the murder of one of their players, Jonson offered his services to the rival Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In 1598, Every Man in his Humour was performed by them with Shakespeare taking a part. This play made Jonson’s reputation. As well as writing for the public stage, Jonson made a career for himself in the writing of court masques in collaboration with the architect Inigo Jones (with whom he had an acrimonious falling out).1

1 For a contemporary account of a court masque see Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, pp.188–191.

These elaborate entertainments became highly developed under King James and Jonson was by far the most successful and prolific exponent of the art form. Jonson gave up writing for the public stage after the failure of his play The Devil is an Ass in 1616 and did not resume until 1625. None of his plays between 1625 and 1633 enjoyed much success, and Jonson died something of a disappointed man.

Jonson has been characterised as a classicist, and certainly his scholarly abilities exceeded Shakespeare’s. When called upon to write a commendatory verse for the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, Jonson wrote of Shakespeare’s possession of ‘small Latin, and less Greek’. This has been taken as an accurate estimate of Shakespeare’s schooling, but it is also an assertion of Jonson’s view of himself as a different kind of dramatist to Shakespeare. As has been mentioned, Jonson wanted to foster an idea of the writer as an educated and intellectual individual, whose works were something more than simple entertainments. A comparison of the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson reveals that Jonson was far more interested in reviving and adapting the dramatic models of classical Greece and Rome than his elder counterpart. As a result, he is often considered to be something of an elitist dramatist, whereas Shakespeare’s drama is considered to be more popular in appeal. The final irony of Jonson’s views of the status of the writer is that it is ultimately Shakespeare’s reputation that benefited the most from the idea of the author as genius.

Editions of the plays

Your first concern should be to gain familiarity with the plays. In practice this means two careful readings of each text. You should be aware that Epicoene, or The Silent Woman is one text. You may come across a version of Every Man in his Humour set in Italy rather than London. This is the text as it appeared in the 1601 quarto (pocket-size) edition of the play, and is not the version we will be considering. We are interested in the play as it appeared in Jonson’s folio Workes of 1616.

The best modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays are the single-volume William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Wells and Taylor and published by Oxford University Press, and The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. The Oxford paperback edition of the former can be bought for around £9 in the United Kingdom and is no doubt the cheapest way to have access to everything that Shakespeare ever wrote. The Norton edition, while more expensive, features an exhaustive introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times, has comprehensive introductions to each play, and a considerable amount of notes at the foot of each page. If you feel that notes are essential to your understanding of the plays, you may well be better off paying the extra for this edition. Another useful edition of the complete works is The Riverside Shakespeare.

There are other, cheaper, editions of Shakespeare’s complete works available, especially ‘illustrated’ editions that feature Victorian engravings of scenes from the plays. These are not to be recommended, as they have neither introductions nor notes and the editorial procedures that dictate them are considered somewhat suspect.

Individual editions of all Shakespeare’s plays are available, and of these the Oxford World’s Classics editions (various editors), and the Arden Shakespeare editions (also various editors) are the best. Both these series feature comprehensive introductions and notes. The Oxford Shakespeare editions are the most up-to-date in terms of critical approach and scholarship, but in recent years the Arden editions have gone into their third series, and several of the plays are available in this series.

As a supplement to any study of Shakespeare’s plays you will find that C.T. Onions’ A Shakespeare Glossary serves very well to explain difficult or archaic words.

Unfortunately there is no single volume edition of Jonson’s works which is comparable to the Oxford Shakespeare. The four volume edition edited by G.A. Wilkes, Ben Jonson: The Complete Plays is a scholarly, and expensive, collection. It would be better to try to collect a set of modern single-play editions (the New Mermaids and the Revels Plays series are especially recommended), or alternatively for the sake of economy you might find the Oxford World Classics Series Ben Jonson: Five Plays plus any editions of Epicoene and Eastward Ho! a good way to cover all the plays we are looking at. The final choice may depend on the particular availability of texts in your area.

The quotations used in Section A of the examination paper, and also in this guide, are from the Wells and Taylor, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works for the Shakespeare plays and from the New Mermaid single-volume editions for the Jonson plays.

The history of the transmission of these texts (the way in which they have come down to us) has some bearing on our study. In the section ‘The Elizabethan theatrical context’ of this guide, we will consider the effects of the dramatic origins of these texts, and in the section ‘The physical layout of the stage and its effect’ we will look at the conditions under which the plays were performed. We are treating the texts primarily as literary works but it is important to remember that they are also scripts for theatrical production. There is an important difference here between the texts of Shakespeare and the texts of Jonson. Shakespeare appears to have had no interest whatsoever in having his plays published. Many of the texts of his plays published in his lifetime are manifestly corrupt, inasmuch as it seems the words printed could not be those the dramatist wrote. Even those that were printed with the consent and assistance of the theatrical company of which Shakespeare was a major shareholder have errors that Shakespeare made no effort to correct. The first ‘complete works’ of Shakespeare was the First Folio published in 1623, seven years after his death. By contrast, Jonson took great pains over the printing of his works in his lifetime. His 1616 collection, called the Workes, was overseen by the author, who had made many revisions in the texts before submitting them to the printers. For this reason Jonson’s texts can be seen much more as literary works than can Shakespeare’s, simply because the latter took no interest in the printed versions of the plays. It can be useful to think of Jonson as primarily a literary writer and Shakespeare as primarily a theatrical practitioner.

The Renaissance and ‘early modern’ periods

Shakespeare and Jonson lived and worked during the period that has retrospectively come to be known as the ‘Renaissance’. The Renaissance in England most often refers to the years between 1485, the establishment of the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII, and 1660, the end of the Civil War and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. Bookended by Henry VII and Charles II, the period also encapsulates the reigns of the monarchs Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, as well as the period of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. For the purposes of this syllabus, however, you will concentrate on the years 1590–1614, the years during which Shakespeare and Jonson produced the plays on our syllabus. These years fall under the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and are known as the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods respectively.

You should be aware that, in English literary studies, the term ‘Renaissance’ is interchangeable with the term ‘early modern’. We might refer to Shakespeare and Jonson as ‘early-modern’ dramatists. This phrase is preferable to the more loaded term ‘Renaissance’, which is most often associated with fourteenth-century Italian art history that connotes an incomparable ‘re-birth’ in the arts. ‘Early modern’ avoids these kind of value judgements, and is especially useful to us as it suggests a degree of continuity between many of the social and cultural developments that took place in this period and the present day: developments such as the rise of the middle classes, the move towards urban living, an awareness of the importance of individuality, the emergence of a capitalist economy instead of a feudal system, the rise in literacy and innovations in education. In early-modern drama, therefore, we can see evidence of emerging ideas and principles that still have currency today.

Early-modern studies have developed into an area of some critical complexity. Among the many issues critics have focused upon are the political aspects of early-modern drama, the representation of gender in performance, and the construction of individual identity. These ideas, and many more, are all relevant to a study of early-modern comedy. Details of critical texts that adopt these kinds of approaches can be found in the bibliography.

Learning outcomes

Having read this chapter, in conjunction with your own study, you should be able to: