Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age.
Lee, John
Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age. By Tom Lockwood. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2005. xii + 257 pp. 51 [pounds sterling]. isbn:
978-0-19-928078-0.
According to the standard accounts, the Romantic age seems to have
been both friend and foe to Jonson: it managed to see Jonson anew and,
most would agree, better; but it also, and rather ironically, managed
to lose sight of him. As often, Shakespeare was Jonson's
problem. Having previously been forced to play the role of dull foil in
arguments on behalf of Shakespeare's bright genius, once
Shakespeare's greatness was agreed, Jonson was allowed to be
himself again. Yet, as Jonson had largely been seen to be of interest
just because of his role as Shakespeare's envious antithesis, a
friendly Jonson was left to wander quietly in the cultural margins.
As Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age shows, the standard accounts need
revision. Jonson's influence, while not growing, continues to be
significant throughout the years from 1776 to 1850. Lockwood
characterizes that influence with an understated theoretical
sophistication as he examines, in successive chapters, Jonson's
theatrical, critical, editorial, and literary afterlives. These chapters
offer a wealth of new information and correctives to previous accounts.
The retrieval of the detail of Jonson's afterlives is, however,
only half of Lockwood's story; he is equally interested in seeing
how Jonson's presence can enrich our understanding of the Romantic
age. Following D. F. McKenzie and Jerome J. McGann, Lockwood considers
the cultural networks within which the period's engagements with
Jonson occurred and which gave those engagements their historically
specific meaning. The point made repeatedly and well is that who Jonson
was seen to be and what his works were seen to represent were questions
both contestable and contested; Jonson was, in other words, a lively
cultural presence.
How important, then, was Jonson to the Romantic age? Taking
Coleridge as his key figure, Lockwood argues that Jonson is central to
the age's understanding of the nature of imitation and allusion. In
a deft and historically nuanced analysis, Coleridge's understanding
of literary relationships is seen to be a product both of his thinking
about the nature of Milton's relationship with Jonson and also of
his thinking about the then topical 'bullion debate', which
concerned the nature of the relationship between paper money and gold
and silver. Lockwood suggests that Coleridge saw his and others'
poems as the equivalent of a paper currency, as the promissory notes that might substitute for, or replace entirely, Jonsonian and other
literary bullion.
Jonson's creative influence, then, was clearly significant,
but Lockwood does not try to suggest that it was anywhere near the equal
of Shakespeare's or Milton's influence. Francis Waldron's
edition and continuation of Jonson's The Sad Shepherd (1783) seems
exemplary here. Lockwood makes good use of this play to show the variety
and interrelated nature of the audiences to whom Jonson was of interest.
What one might also note is the way in which Waldron's able and
sensible continuation gradually loses its Jonsonian voice. Acts I and II
show Jonson, unusually, engaging on a large scale and positively with
Spenser, and particularly with The Faerie Queene. However, in the
following three acts, which were written by Waldron, Jonson's
presence fades as the influence of Spenser recedes, to be replaced by
that of Shakespeare and, in particular, The Tempest. Even for
Jonson's greatest admirers, it seems it was impossible to imagine
his plays in any but Shakespearean terms.
John Lee
University of Bristol
