Ben Jonson
Intertextualities: The Influence of the Classics in Ben Jonson’s Volpone
Ben Jonson is a writer who was deeply influenced by earlier novels in both themes and structures. In the opening of the Prologue to Volpone, the play of interest in this paper, Jonson invokes Horace and Aristotle, promising to “mix profit with your pleasure” and to observe the “laws of Time, Place, Persons”
what is known as classical decorum. There are plenty of critics who see a balance in Jonson’s work, as he invokes the classics when and where he deems it appropriate to the contexts of his writings. There are other critics, however, that would argue that Jonson not only based his work on classics, but essentially copied them. While this is one opinion, it is better suggested that Jonson did not copy, but rather, he shaped Volpone and its meanings by using other texts. Jonson borrows themes and motifs from several classic writers and writes Volpone in a way that feels like a response to earlier works. For this reason, the post-modern notion of intertextuality can be applied to Volpone. Baskervill wrote that Jonson “seized upon ideas and methods which had run through English literature almost unconsciously and yet with increasing strength, and that after his own fashion brought them to consciousness and to the dignity if a type and formulated the laws of that type.” Thus it cannot be merely assumed that Jonson was a plagiarist, lacking in originality. “Technically considered, no one of the Elizabethan poets is more original than he.”
Taking these comments into account, this paper will serve the purpose of showing how Volpone is rife with intertextuality, being influenced by Catullus, Plautus, Juvenal, Dante and Horace — among others.
Intertextuality is a way of communicating and it occurs when an author refers to other texts within his own text expecting that his readers will understand the references as part of the strategy of the text. The ideal reader will not only be aware of these references but will also understand that the author is aware of their presence in the text as well as the reader’s awareness of them. “This form of intertextuality will therefore as a rule be intended, distinct form non-intertextual passages, and marked, and it is held to be different from influence as well as from plagiarism.”
In some cases, it can also work to legitimize a piece of literary work.
The postmodernist concept of intertextuality can best be characterized by this classic quotation of Julia Kristeva’s:
Tout texte se construit comme mosaique de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d’ un autre texte. A la place de la notion d’intersubjecctivite s’installe celle d’intertextualite, et le langage poetique se lit, au moins, comme double. (Every text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, every text is an absorption and a transformation of another text. Thus the term ‘intersubjectivity’ is replaced by the term ‘intertextuality,’ and the language of poetry has to be read, at the least, as double).
The text of Volpone is literally filled with imitations of famous classical writing. One example can be seen in the legacy hunting (the main plot of the play), specifically in its combining attacks on the captators (legacy hunters, grasping people) of imperial Rome in Horace’s Satires 2.5, several of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, and a part of Petronius’s Saturicon, with some smaller elements taken from Juvenal. The characterization of Lady Would-be Politic as a chatterbox also comes straight from Juvenal’s misogynistic Satire 6, with elaborations from Du Mulier Loquaci (a Latin translation of a Greek declamation by Libanius of Antioch which became the major source for Epicoene or the Silent Woman). The first entertainment performed by Volpone’s attendants, Nano, Androgyno, and Castrone parodies Pythagoras’s doctrine of reincarnation, combines Lucians Somnium with details taken from the De Philosophorum Vitis of Diogenes Laertius. There are also quite a few lengthy speeches that are purposefully based on popular classical models. One example is at the beginning of Volpone when Volpone parodies Ovid’s description of the Golden Age in Book I of Metamorphoses; his description of old age is a reworking of Juvenal’s Satire 10, and his wooing song to Celia translates — but also corrupts a famous love poem by Catullus. Volpone is a play filled with classical echoes and reminiscences, which are transformed by placing them in different contexts. During the Renaissance, this intertextuality was called “imitatio” and it represents how classical texts and themes manifested themselves in Renaissance literature.
One of the Latin writers whom English love poets have obviously admired is Catullus. Blevins notes that during the 1920s and 1930s, there was very little recognition concerning the significance of Catullus’ poems and their impact on English writers. However, in 1939, James McPeek wrote a book entitled, Catullus in Strange and Distant Britain, and it remains to this day one of the most detailed works in illustrating the influence of Catullus on English poetry. In the book, he alludes to very specific passages in Catullus’ poems and how they were used later in Renaissance literature including Jonson’s Volpone.
The one place where Catullus’ influence on Jonson cannot be denied is in the song that Volpone sings to Celia in an attempt to seduce her. While this is readily the most apparent use of Catullus intertextuality, it can also be argued that Catullus influences the entire play when it comes to themes and motifs. Catullus goes back and forth between love/hate in his feelings for Lesbia in Carmina, just as Volpone and Corvino do in relation to Celia. These vacillations in both works, in the end, depict a certain readiness to degrade relationships to merely financial ones, which puts the woman — Lesbia in Catullus’ case and Celia in Jonson’s — in the position of a prostitute.
Jonson uses contaminatio — the combining of discreet sources into a text to make a wholly new work — in Volpone more than in any other of his plays (though he also uses it to a large extent in the Alchemist as well). Erasmus’ in Praise of Folly, Petronius’ Satyricon, Lucian’s satires, and beast fables are commonly cited as sources for Jonson’s Volpone.
All of these sources are a major part of the Volpone and they have all gotten their share of attention because of this. Catullus’ poem, however, does not receive as much attention, in general, when it comes to citing sources for Jonson’s play. The poem, when closely examined, gives Jonson everything he needs to structure the world of corrupt Venice in the play.
Volpone’s song of the attempted seduction of Celia (though he fails and thus tries to rape her) is taken straight from Catallus’ carmina 5 — one of the most well-known kiss poems. However, Shelburne
notes that critics’ assessment of the relationship between the play and the poem are incorrectly based on a fractured evaluation of Catullus’ poems and of the relationship between the poem and the play. Talk of Jonson’s contaminatio generally reflect upon how Volpone perverts the expression of love that Jonson takes from the poem — taking what was sweet and innocent and putting it into the mouth of Volpone, making it greedy and lustful. Slights states:
Volpone continues his virtuoso performance with the famous carpe diem lyric adapted from Catallus…[which is] charming in itself but devastating to his cause in this context… the social divisiveness that Volpone advocates in the song, harmless enough in the context of Catullus’s little book of verse, but thoroughly nasty in Jonson’s play, compounds itself ironically when the effect of the song is further to alienate the ‘beloved.’
Jonson’s revision and adaptation of the Catullan poem is probably a few of his most anthologized lines. Sara van den Berg states that the “polished redactions of the Catullan lyric…often measure the world of love in terms of the actual English world.” Alexander Leggatt along those same lines argues that the Celia poem combines “traditional motifs” with the focus on a “surrounding reality” that is “more factual” and “simpler.”
Jacob Blevins states, “Lesbia is quite a willing participant; Celia is not. Rape is an option for Volpone; Catullus’ lover claims that he wants a real relationship based on something more than physical desire.”
Blevins suggests that Jonson wrote at the start of a trend in which neo-classical poets imitated the words of their classical predecessors but not necessarily their sentiments. Stephen Orgel states that Renaissance art gave its patrons the pleasures of recognition, and he argued that this is one of the reasons why the song to Celia very clearly alludes to Catullus’ poem.
Other critics feel strongly that Jonson’s use is a blatant corruption of the poem. James Riddell
states that Volpone’s song ends on a note that isn’t “anything close to the letter or the spirit of [Catullus’s] poem.” He thus indicts Volpone’s manipulation of language: “To employ Catullus’s lovely poem to such perverse ends is to deny what poetry’s chief aim must be, to delight and to teach — the two, properly speaking, are not separate.” James a.S. McPeek
further blames Jonson for this corruption: “No one can read this dainty song to Celia without feeling that Jonson is indecorous in putting it in the mouth of such a thoroughgoing scoundrel as Volpone.”
Shelburne
asserts that the usual view of Jonson’s use of the Catullan poem is distorted by an insufficient understanding of Catullus’ carmina, which comes from critics’ willingness to adhere to a conventional — yet incorrect and incomplete — reading of the love poem. When Jonson created his adaptation of carmina 5, there was only one other complete translation in English of a poem by Catullus. That translation is believed to have been Sir Philip Sidney’s rendering of poem 70 in Certain Sonnets, however, it was not published until 1598.
This means that Jonson’s knowledge of the poem must have come from the Latin text printed in C. Val. Catulli, Albii, Tibulli, Sex. Aur. Propertii Opera omnia quae estant, which was published in Paris in 1604 and known for certain to have been in Jonson’s personal library.
It seems that following Volpone, Catullus’ love poems became more and more popular as his poems were appearing in translation more frequently.
What this means, however, is that the process of selection by translators privileged only a few poems, creating the idea that Catullus wasn’t as wild as he really was. The tame version of Catullus’ poem is often believed to be the authority. This even occurs now (people thinking that Catullus is tame) because most people will read Catullus in anthologies, where these “superficially innocent poems appear in isolation, having been dislocated from the context of the other poems.”
Paul Allen Miller
states:
In Catullus, it is evidenced by those editions which either suppress sexually explicit and scatological passages or print them but refuse all comment. The result is the tamed Catullus of the oft anthologized kiss poems or the pathetic “odi et amo” [“I hate and I love”], carefully insulated from their far more complex and troubling contexts.
Shelburne
states that whether the usual reading of Catullus’ poems comes from the assumptions made by critics who work with an incomplete version of Catullus or from tamed versions of the poem in seventeenth-century lyrics, the common reading of Volpone misrepresents the relationship between Catullus and Jonson and prevents a full understanding of the play. This is because the connection goes beyond the translation of one poem and part of a second; it goes beyond to include the main themes and motifs in the carmina which Jonson uses in Volpone to portray the corruption of familial and civil relationships. To show Jonson’s extension of contaminatio to include the incorporation of non-dramatic sources and to illustrate how far-reaching the Catullan influence is in Volpone, the poem will be looked at further.
What must be noted while reading Catullus’ poem is the beauty of it. If the poem were just merely being looked at superficially, its innocent cannot be denied:
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis.
soles occidere et redire posunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, aut ne quis malus invidere posit, cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.
Next, we will take a look at the poem translated into English by Barriss Mills:
Let’s live and love, my Lesbia, and value at a pennyworth what the crabbed old folks say.
Suns may set and rise again, but once our own brief light goes out, night’s one perpetual sleeping.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand.
Then a second hundred, and then still another thousand, and then a hundred more. And when we’ve got to many thousands, we’ll lose count, till we don’t know.
And spiteful persons won’t be able to put jinxes on us, unless they know how many were our kisses.
While Catullus’ poem has chiefly been viewed as a love poem and it is, indeed, quite playful, there is something that is also a bit threatening about it. Shelburne states that just as Catullus gives voice to his desire to Lesbia, there are also threats that go along with the desire for satisfaction: the rumors of condemnation of society figured in the severe old men, the threat of being responsible for the love affair, and the narrator’s superstitious fear of an envious observer answer all of Catullus’ pleas for more kisses. In order for there to be threats against the two of them, this implies that there must be something that is not completely innocent about the affair between the two. Catullus states that they must act with haste because they do not have much time. He also states that they must act despite the consequences and the rumors — as well as the possibility of being observed by others.
Now we can compare Catullus’ love poem to Volpone’s song. It is important to note that like Catullus, Jonson decides to make the threat of an observer known and he also hints at the idea that what they are doing is quite wrong.
Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever,
He, at length, our good will sever;
Spend not then his gifts in vain.
Suns that set may rise again:
But if once we lose this light, ‘Tis with us perpetual night.
Why should we defer our joys?
Fame and rumor are but toys.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few household spies?
or his easier ears beguile,
Thus removed by our wile?
‘Tis no sin love’s fruit to steal;
But the sweet thefts to reveal:
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.
While the first eight lines are pretty close to Catullus’ original, the last half of the poem focuses more on seemingly criminal elements associated with the two. For example, the household spies, love’s fruit to steal, the sweet thefts, and these crimes. Volpone, however, is trying to convince Celia that the only crime would be in being taken or in being seen. Celia, however, will not have any of it and she is fully aware that Volpone is using her husband’s greed as a means to have what he desires.
Braden, Cummings and Gillespie
claim that Jonson is reading Catullus here through Ovid and Martial. They argue that his opening trivialization of ‘the sports of love’ recalls the Marlovian Ovid’s designation of sex as ‘sport.’ Instead of Catullus’ demand for infinite kisses, Jonson demands an admonition to secrecy. In the line “Tis no sin love’s fruit to steal; / but the sweet thefts to reveal: / to be taken, to be seen, / These have crimes accounted been,” Braden et al. name this a mockery of Christian notions of sin which can also be found in Ovid’s Amores.
There are other elements in Jonson’s Volpone, that can be compared to earlier works — other than Catullus — spanning different genres and styles. Volpone can be directly correlated to Aesop if we merely consider the title of the play — Volpone, which literally translates into “fox.” Davis
says there is clearly a connection between Volpone and Aesop’s “The Fox and the Grapes” and its variants, which were incredibly popular during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. While Aesop used the personalities of animals to embody the weaknesses of human beings, as well as make fun of them, all the while teaching a moral, Volpone is a fraud who tries to embody the weaknesses of animals. This makes his work not simply a Comedy of Humours or Manners, but rather, a sort of drama that combines manners as well as moral fable. The animal-like humans are greatly exaggerated and go against the classical ideals of diffidence. What Jonson has done with Volpone is created a new way of writing, a way in which no other writer before him did, even though he is absolutely influenced by their structure and ideas and even though he often likes to turn those structures and ideas on their heads.
Dante’s the Divine Comedy also influenced Jonson’s play Volpone. Both the Divine Comedy and Volpone depict deceit as a core evil; the judgment of deceit is a theme of both works and, in each, there is a great discipline for those who have erred. In Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, Dante writes:
Of every malice that earns hate in Heaven, injustice is the end; and each such end by force or fraud brings harm to other men.
However, fraud is man’s peculiar vice;
God finds it more displeasing — and therefore, the fraudulent are lower, suffering more.
In respect to the seriousness of deceit, both Jonson and Dante take this as a very grave pretense. Volpone and Mosca’s punishments in Volpone stand out as a standard of penance in the same way that Dante handled his sinners. This being so, some may see Volpone and Mosca’s punishments as being quite harsh considering that the play is considered a comedy and that Volpone and Mosca were merely trying to create some excitement with their tomfoolery. This is quite the same as what happens in Dante’s Inferno, which shows that Jonson was influenced by this work. There are various characters in Dante’s work that have their admirable qualities as well as their not-so-admirable qualities, but still, they must go on to suffer an eternity in hell for their actions. One has to note that the central characters in both works — Volpone and Satan — are quite similar as are the characters of Beatrice and Celia in Mosca and the sinner Mosca dei Lamberti, and Volpone himself and the sinner Gianni Schicchi.
Volpone is the embodiment of moral greed, a “fox” who deceives those around him by feigning a grave illness in order to gain money as sympathy. Corvino, Corbaccio, Voltore, and Lady Would-be Politic — his “clients” — all bring him gifts in hopes that they will make it into his will, as they are moved by avarice just as Volpone. This is to say that in their lust for wealth, the readily give away their own.
Volpone’s opening soliloquy has him worshipping gold — “Good morning to the day, and, next, my gold! / Open the shrine that I might see my saint.”
Mosca, Volpone’s assistant, is happy to help the wealthy miser dupe avaricious Venetians. These would-be heirs are Voltore (vulture), Corbaccio (crow), and Corvino (raven), “three birds of prey skillfully duped by the wily fox (Volpone) and the subtle gadfly (Mosca).”
Volpone is not just avaricious, he is also a hedonist in the purest sense, which is a major influence form the medieval tradition. In fact, at one point, Mosca says: “Let’s die like Romans, since we have lived like Grecians!”
There are allegorical allusions as well as it offers the idea that men can be turned into animals as a result of greed.
We can also see the use of animals in Shakespeare’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which an animal is able to completely seduce Titania. This is to say that this type of wit that is employed in Volpone had been used before. However, Volpone is different because there is a sort of melange of human and animal personalities that gives the ability to laugh at man. This itself is not something that came from the classics.
In Inferno’s Canto XXVII, Guido da Montefeltro is introduced and asks about what is going on politically in Italy’s physical world. Dante’s response offers a metaphorical connection between citizens and animals. Is it a coincidence that Jonson also applied the same convention for naming characters through bestialization? Da Montefeltro even cites his own likeness to a fox (Volpone):
While I still had the form of bones and flesh
My mother gave to me, my deeds were not Those of the lion but those of the fox.
The wiles and secret ways — I knew them all
And so employed their arts that my renown
Had reached the very boundaries of earth.
Volpone gets a very bleak sentence for all of his lies and machinations, but these ideas about integrity and disdain for material excess were not new ideas that Jonson had considering his role as a playwright and the era in which he lived. In 1314, the Divine Comedy, had already established a destination for avarice, fraudulence, and lust in the depths of Hell, three of the exact same offenses that Volpone is accountable for. In fact, Dante’s take on crime and punishment is mimicked in the final outcome of Volpone, and thus it is easy to see an influence of Dante on Jonson’s work.
In the third act of Volpone, Lady Politic Would-be refers to Dante: “Dante is hard, and few can understand him. / but for a desperate wit, there’s Aretine!”
Because of Lady Would-be’s character, is isn’t all that astounding for her to give this opinion of Dante.
This couple, however, is such a pair of fools that her judgment of Dante can hardly be taken for Jonson’s own, and her ignorant dismissal of the poet implies exactly the opposite attitude on the part of the dramatist himself. That her remark echoes Dante’s own comment to Can
Grande that his epic was “polysemous” and “not simple” hints at more than a secondary knowledge of Dante by Jonson. Jonson’s satiric conception of Venice as a locus of corruption, his cast of perverse characters, and his emphasis upon an appropriate final punishment for each of the evildoers combine to recall structural and thematic elements of Dante’s work…Jonson was a dramatist always sensitive to the shaping influence of native English morality plays; surely, then, he would also have been drawn to the most vigorous medieval condemnation of sin composed on the Continent, especially during those twelve years (1598-
1610) when he was himself a Roman Catholic. All of these considerations would have made Dante’s combination of comedy and severe morality an appealing combination to Jonson and one not easily found in most other sources available to him
Jonson, in more of a technical effort, infers that the author of the Divine Comedy is an erudite writer since it could not be so that Lady Would-be could possibly understand his works because she is a character that is controlled by vanity as well — which is of course a deadly sin.
There is the notion that Jonson thought quite highly of Dante because he takes on the role of judge just as Dante did. The fact that Dante is mentioned in Volpone has got to have some association to Dante’s work. Both Dante and Jonson’s works are called comedies, yet the punishments that each contain are anything but comedic.
There is a subplot in the play that is analogous in structure to the main plot and involves Sir Politic Would-be, an English wayfarer, who also has some of the same qualities as Volpone. The tricksters of both the plot and subplot are uncovered and virtue (i.e., in Celia and Bonario) is rewarded. In the article “The Double Plot in Volpone,” Barish sets out to defend the subplot against the charge that it is irrelevant to the play because of the fact that it does not seem to have any correlation to the main plot. He finds the connections, characteristically for the criticism of that period, “on the thematic level,” which actually confirms what Jonson says in the prologue of Volpone, that the play is not some kind of eclectic entertainment, but it is a carefully structured one.
“Nor made he’his play, for iests, stolne from each table, / but makes iests, to fit his fable.” That is, the jests fit the play; and the jests are made for the sake of the play, not the other way around. His role in the play, as fate would have it, is to do badly what Volpone can do very well.
He is the “would-be” of everything that Volpone is. Still, though Sir Politic is not as bad as Volpone, it is only because he does not have the know-how or the ingenuity to do so. This is why he is also judged harshly at the end of the play. They are two aspects of the same evil.
One final comment to make about the Divine Comedy and Volpone is the fact that Jonson was touching on something with Volpone that Dante was touching on way before his time. Around the time that Jonson wrote Volpone, there was a major shift in the way that people saw the world. Whereas people may have been very set in their religious ways before, Jonson was aware that he was embarking on an age where God mattered a bit less than before. When God is taken out of the picture, there is more temptation to lust for money, sex, and power. Looking at Volpone’s entire speech about gold says a lot.
Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.
Hail the world’s soul, and mine! More glad than is
The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram,
Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his;
That lying here, amongst my other hoards,
Show’st like a flame by night, or like the day
Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled
Unto the centre. O, thou son of Sol
(but brighter than they father) let me kiss,
With adoration, thee, and every relic of sacred treasure in this blessed room
Jonson is often accused of taking others works and making them his own, but this was simply a part of his creative genius. He could rework themes and ideas to fit into his contemporary setting. He got much of his influence from the European theatre — the Commedia dell’arte specifically and one can find direct associations between the characters in Volpone and the Italian theatre. Volpone himself can be considered a sort of Pantalone form the Commedia, whose character could go from a miserly and ineffectual old man to an energetic cuckholder with animal ferocity. Jonson easily mixes this with classical references as well as other forms of theatrical styles. He also, of course, found influence in the morality plays of the medieval period where actors were the embodiment of certain human characteristics as noted earlier. Despite all the different influences, Jonson was able to bring all of these elements together into a purposeful whole with Volpone (as well as his other plays). His plays were very realistic and they were critical of people and society, in general.
Volpone, or the Fox, is one of Jonson’s masterpieces and it is a play that is made up nearly entirely of other sources, yet it remains original. Ben Jonson was a playwright who found his material in books as opposed to human life. Rea suggests that this style made Jonson a sort of mosaic-maker as opposed to painter – especially in the case of Volpone. As clearly seen, as a whole, it is difficult to state what exactly Jonson used as a major source for this work. He obviously was well-read in his classics and his play shows a lot of similarities to the work of Dante in the Divine Comedy as well as to the popular Aesop in “The Fox and the Grapes.”
Some critics point to Dante, some to Aesop, and others to Horace, to Petronius, to Plautus, to Lucian and to Erasmus. Jonson was well read in all of them as one can clearly ascertain by reading a good variety of Ben Jonson’s works. He was, in a way, a master of all things — of all styles, forms, and structures. He was able to create intricate plots containing intricate subplots and he was able to make audiences laugh while teaching a lesson at the same time. He was skilled in the morality plays, in fables, and in the comedy of humours and manners. Any way we look at Volpone, it is a mosaic, a patchwork of observations rather than a work created by mere imagination.
‘Restorer of the Old’: Intertextuality in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour
Works of literature are built from systems, codes and traditions that have been established by previous works of literature, according to postmodern thinking. This means that the meaning (or meanings) of a piece of text does not simply transfer from the writer to the reader, but rather, it must move through “codes” that have been communicated to the writer and reader by other texts. It can be argued therefore that texts lack any kind of independent meaning(s). They are what is called ‘intertextual’, a term coined by Julia Kristeva (i.e., intertextualite) in the 1960s. When we come to a piece of literary work such as Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour, we are plunged into a network of textual relations harking back to Latin comedy and Greek philosophies. To understand the text, to uncover its meaning or meanings, requires that we must trace these relations.
When reading Jonson’s play, meaning can be taken not just from the text that he wrote but also the texts in which he built upon. Meaning can also be taken from reading the intertext from his 1601 Quarto version and his 1616 Folio version. “Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.”
This does not change even when Jonson decided to revise his text; his Quarto still informed the Folio and it was built upon with new ideas and with new experiences and social conditions in mind. This paper will explore some of the earlier texts that Jonson has both imitated and emulated in his play Every Man in His Humour, specifically in relation to the prototypes that he used for his characters. It will be illustrated through examples in this paper that Jonson is a restorer of the older texts of Plautus and Terence — among others — and cannot be dismissed as mere imitator. Special attention will also be given to Jonson’s revision of Every Man in’s Folio version where he changed the Florentine setting and Italian named characters to a London setting with English named characters as well as some of the condensation and expansion of the play as it pertains to intertextuality. The purpose of the paper is to explore intertextuality, in general, and to acknowledge that imitation and emulation is something that the ancient writers believed to be quite admirable.
Jonson was known even in his time for being a restorer of the old. John Donne, a contemporary of Jonson’s, praised him saying: “No one is such a follower of the ancients as you / because you, restorer of the old, follow those you approve.”
Dryden said something quite similar and equally as complimentary: “He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin… He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him.”
Likewise, more recent critics observe that, “it is really a strange critical error to hold that the Jonsonian conception of the dramatic humour is only an English copy of Plautine and Terentian types and that his braggarts and gulls and misers were but Romans in doublet and ruff…”
Jonson was not a plagiarist and he acknowledged that no man was his master. His dramatic concepts, he would argue, came not from the study of literature (though he was undoubtedly very well-read and his imitation of the classics seems almost unconscious at times) but from the study of life. David Daiches
states that Jonson was a “rugged Englishman with a sardonic relish for the carried and colorful London life of his day…he showed enormous and impressive originality even when most closely following classical models or applying rules from classical theory or practice.” All of these flattering quotes uphold the notion that Jonson was a great student of the classic tradition, but, moreover, they all maintain that Jonson was able to use these texts in order to create his own works that are equally as great. They are all alluding to a word that had not yet been created — intertextuality.
Plautus and Terence have been mentioned as some of the most influential writers for Jonson, but there are others as well. The story of a man doomed because of his one single humour (or passion) can very obviously be seen in Sophocles’ character Oedipus. The comedy of humours attempts to show the workings of a man who is controlled by one motivational passion — or humour (in Oedipus’ case it was hubris). Jonson not only borrowed the form and structure as well as character prototypes from the old masters, but he was also borrowing an idea from ancient Greek medicine. The term “humours” comes from the ancient Greek physicians and then later from the medieval system of medicine. The system basically visualized four chief humours corresponding with the four elements -fire, air, earth, and water — and having the quality of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture, respectively. In Jonsons’ play, he is taking this idea from the Greeks quite literally in his creation of characters whom are guided by their own passions.
Every Man in is undoubtedly influenced in form and structure by Plautus’ comedies. Like many of Plautus’s plays, Jonson’s Every Man in centers on a couple of lovers whom are ordered to stay away form each other and thus they must overcome obstacles in order to be together. Furthermore, Miola
notes that “the meddlesome-father-against-merry-son” dilemma between Young and Old Know’ell is similar to Horace’s description of the old man and the youthful chap, taking part in activities that his father doesn’t want him to take part in. This comes across in the secret love affair. To desire a woman who is off limits to one and to then deceive a parent because of it doesn’t seem to be of structural importance in Every Man in, however. This would have been a structural element in the classical poets’ works — especially pertaining to Plautus or Terence, but in Jonson’s play “it is one among many incidents, and not so much more important than they.”
Either way, the obstacles are typically classical — specifically, their family and society dictates who they think each should be with or, in the case of Every Man in, not be with.
The other element that goes back to Plautine comedy is that idea of a pair of dignified older men being outsmarted by a couple of cunning younger men, as well as the characters of the sly servant and the braggart soldier. Bryant asserts that Every Man in is quite sturdy in its “Terentian” structure as well. The father-son motive takes place quite apparently in eight of Plautus’ plays and in five of Terence’s. Other than the father-son motive in Roman comedy, there is also a lack of respect towards elders and a great deal of pleasure is taken in seeing older men duped by younger, cleverer men that is characteristic of Roman comedy. This is the same type of atmosphere than Jonson employs in Every Man in. The Young Know’ell is not a very serious offender when looking at most of the young men of the “New Comedy.”
In the New Comedies, in general, there is the running through of many different vices. When the personal qualities that make Young Know’ell a typical Englishman are taken away, his behaviors are what made Roman audiences happy. The friendship that he shares with Well-Bred is also quite conventional. Certainly, young Romans took pleasure in these types of tricks just as the English did.
The typical father portrayed in Roman comedy is of two different types. The type reflected in the older Kno’well in Every Man in can be compared to Charmides in Plautus’ Trinummus, who is entirely moral and forgiving.
In Trinummus, Charmides’ property is nearly wasted by his son and so he goes abroad. While he is away, his son depletes the rest of his father’s resources and even sells his home. When he returns home, he sees what his son has done and forgives him. However, the father may also be “vicious and immoral, abetting his son in his knavery, or practicing independent vices of his own. A suggestion of the mingling of the two types in Old Knowell is seen in the ease with which he still his conscience when he reads his son’s letter.”
The braggart soldier is another prototype taken directly from the Latin tradition of comedy and Jonson realized how essential it is to classical comedy. Bobadil appears to be somewhat reminiscent of native incarnations such as Ralph Roister Doister and Thersites.
However, the bragger soldier has his most complete incarnation in Pyrgopolynices, the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus, and he appears as well, though in a less pronounced form, in Therapontigonus, in Curculio, and Stratophanes, in Truculentus.
The original Miles is a ‘bragging, impudent, stinking fellow, brimful of lying and lasciviousness, [who] says that all the women are following him out of their own accord.’ He killed a hundred and fifty men in Cilicia, a hundred in Cryphiolathrona, thirty at Sardis, sixty at Macedon, and five hundred at Cappadocia altogether at one blow.
Compare this with Bobadil’s boast in Every Man in:
Say the enemy were forty thousand strong, we twenty would come into the field…we would challenge twenty of the enemy;…Well,
we would kill them; twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them; twenty more, ill them; twenty more, kill them too; and thus would we kill every man his twenty a day, that’s twenty score;
twenty score, that’s two hundred; two hundred a day, five days a thousand; forty thousand; forty times five, five times forty, two hundred days kill them all up by computation.
Moreover, when Clement sentences Bobadil to wear motley, it is also reminiscent of Pyrgopolynices, Pistol, and Falstaff.
Bodadil can definitely be paralleled in classical comedy.
Despite this parallel found, Craig
argues that Bobadil is a complete original. He believes that this coward, assuming the dignity of calm courage was new to the stage. From Bobadil, he argues that Congreve created Noll Bluff (a part that was acted by Ben Jonson). Craig does note as well that in drawing the character, he believes that Jonson had Terence and Plautus in mind, however, but it does not distract from the character’s originality. Bobadil is thus completely English — not Roman. Gifford states that Bobadil has always been difficult to understand and because of this he is not estimated very highly. Because he is both a boaster and a coward, he is oftentimes seen as an pure imitation or copy of the ancient bully. However, though the prototype may be there, Bobadil is not completely like the “ancient bullies.” Jonson has created a new character for the time, taking the prototype and working from there to create a character that his audience would understand and relate to.
Brainworm comes from the traditional slave/parasite such as Pseudolus, Tranio, Phormio, who is able to trick the master and pit son and father against each other (later we see this in the Alchemist with Face). Brainworm does not follow the conventional servants in the classic plays. Brainworm is probably the only character in the play who doesn’t have any social agenda. There isn’t really anything that he wants for himself. Well-Bred, on the other hand, is a key encourager of Know’ ell Jr.’s visit, tries to make Know’ell Sr. angry, and is the one who arranges the secret marriage and is the conductor of the big chaotic seen outside of Cob’s house.
Brainworm is praised at the end of the play by Clement for his ability to trick everyone and his talent for metamorphosis. “The qualities of freedom, flexibility, and capacity for change win final approbation in a play which features so many individuals possessed by humours trapped in stifling patterns of thought and action.”
Every Man in also utilizes the mistaken identity device, which the Latin poets used quite often and served a number of different purposes. For example, a disguise may be needed as a sort of temporary action for a specific purpose, or mistaken identity can occur because of children mixed at birth, which then calls for the writer to employ a recognition scene and have the whole matter cleared up by the end of the play. In the case of Every Man in His Humour, all of the mistaken identities are used temporarily and to serve a purpose, and they are all thought up by Brainworm. This mistaken identity device is as useful to Jonson in his play as it was to the classical poets.
Carter
notes that the “two-faced, intriguing servant is an indispensable factor in Roman comedy, and no play belonging to it is without him.” In the character of Brainworm we see a person who doesn’t have any relationship that is more important to him than his own causes or any obligation that he will do that goes beyond his own obligation to himself. “A servant to a father and a son, he may be faithful to one and untrue to the other, aid one to bring about the other’s discomfiture, or be untrue to both.”
This is clearly seen in Brainworm. While the captivating servant is essential to classical comedy, so is the gull or the dupe. If you have a trickster duping, there must be a person who is tricked or duped. Of course, there are many people who could fit into this latter role. For example, the father can be duped by the son as in Every Man in His Humour; the wife can be duped by her husband; and even the parasite can sometimes be rebuffed.
There are varying levels of gullibility. These levels range from instances where the trick is accomplished only because the deceiver is widely clever to instances where the one being tricked is not very smart. In Every Man in His Humour, Old Know’ell is tricked by his son, and both Old and Young Know’ell are tricked by Brainworm through his skill in stratagem. Stephen, on the other hand, is tricked on all sides because he’s simply not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Baskerville
finds medieval precedent for humours comedy in the Ship of Fools and a Quarter of Knaves, both presenting groups of fools to be disposed wholesale at the end. The Ship of Fools is an allegory in which a ship of people whom are considered to be deranged and frivolous are all in a ship without a captain and going somewhere where none of them is privy to. Baskervill characterizes the spirit of Jonson’s treatment as medieval, pointing to “the correction of vice in morality plays, the picturesque medieval rogues who foreshadow Musco [Brainworm], and the portrayal of women as coarse, vulgar, and sensual.
He also observes humours comedy in an Humourous Day’s Mirth as well as in the works of Fenton, Lyly, Harvey, Greene, Nashe, and Lodge.
John Davies among others supply examples of gulls: Munday’s the Two Italian Gentlemen and Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, which supplied Jonson with sort of prototypes for Bobadil.
Baskervill next compares Jonson’s Every Man in with Chapman’s an Humourous Day’s Mirth (1597), where the character of Labesha is the gull under study. Baskervill believes that Chapman’s play suggested as much for Every Man in as did anything else in the drama. He notes that, first off, it appears to be the earliest play in existence in which a definite program of humours is developed. Also, Chapman uses the word humour for his types more often in an Humourous Day’s Mirth than Jonson does in the Case is Altered of about the same date or in Every Man in of later date, to illustrate the fundamental stupidity of the individual.
Baskervill notes that it is clear that the characters in Every Man in and an Humourous Day’s Mirth were studied from the perspectives of humours. The most common humour appearing in the plays is that of jealousy — a sort of mental unbalance (also to note, jealousy has the name applied to it more often than any other character proclivity).
Kitely is the character of jealous humour in Every Man in His Humour. Wabasha in an Humorous Day’s Mirth also seems to have been the inspiration for Stephen, the country gull in Every Man in.
Other possible sources for Every Man in His Humour can be traced to Francis Merbury’s the Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom (1579).
In the 1601 Quarto version of Every Man in His Humour, in Act II, Scene I, Musco [Brainworm], disguised as an old soldier, is asked by Lorenzo Junior [Know’ell Jr.] where he has served. He answers thus:
May it please you Signior, in all the provinces of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Poland, where not? I have been a poore servitor by sea and land, any time this xiiiii. Yeares, and follow’d the fortunes of the best Commaunders in Christendome. I was twise shot at the taking of Aleppo, one at the reliefe of Vienna; I have beene at America in the gaylleyes thrise, where I was most dangerously shot in the head, through both thighs, and yet being thus maim’d I am voide of maintenance, nothing left me but my scares, the noted markes of my resolution. (II.i.55-64).
With just a few changes, this speech remains nearly the same in the Folio version of 1616 (II.iv.58-68), where Musco’s name has now been changed to Brainworm.
While there hasn’t been a direct source for this, there is a very similar speech in the Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, which might have suggested Brainworm’s speech to Jonson.
Because of references in Anthony Mundy’s Sire Thomas More, it is apparent that the play was familiar in the early 1590s, to it can be logical to assume that Jonson, writing a few years after this, was aware of the play.
According to Roland Barthes, intertextuality is much more than just influence and in the case of Every Man in, we can now see Jonson clearly uses the prototypes of humours from Plautus and Terence as well as from Chapman and Merbury. Gifford states that with Every Man in, it is obvious that Jonson was a recent study of not only ancient writers but of his contemporaries as well. It is not that difficult to imagine Jonson with his models placed out before him as he wrote — specifically in such a passage as that in the epilogue of Every Man in: “I will not do as Plautus in his Amphytrio for all this summi Jovis causa plaudite; beg a plaudite for God’s sake; but if you out of the bounty of your goodness will bestow it.”
Though using Terence and Plautus as models for his play as can be seen in the humours prototypes taken straight from Latin comedy (i.e., the jealous husband, shy father, rakish sons, the scheming servant, etc.), his plays cannot be called mere translations of Latin comedy into English. Plautus and Terence have only helped to suggest these characters. There are not any more genuine sketches of London characters in drama. They are not taken directly from Terence and Plautus’ works, but from observation.
Barthes explains how this type of intertextuality occurs:
A text is…a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations…the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.
Foucault insisted that the frontiers of a text are never clear cut. Except for its title or its first lines and beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, the text is working within a system of references to other texts and other sentences: “It is a node within a network…the book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands…Its unity is variable and relative.”
Jonson’s works are not put together as imitations of several other works and thus they cannot be called pastiches; however, there is no doubt that these ancient works inform Every Man in. Other Jonsonian plays use classic plays as direct sources for Jonson’s own, but Every Man in adopts New Comedic character, action and design. Miola states that in his intertextual practice, Jonson follows the words of Cordatus, who followed Jonson, advocating the flexibility and the free play of liberty and invention. Cordatus says:
Menander, Philemom, Cecilius, Plautus, and the rest, who have utterly excluded the chorus, altered the property of the persons, their names, and natures, and augmented it with all liberty, according to the elegancy and disposition of those times wherein they wrote. I see not then, but we should enjoy the same licence or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they did.
There are other general elements in Every Man in that have other reminiscences of classical comedy: the less important female romantic lead; the frequent use of letters and messengers; the mock duel (perhaps coming from Truculentus); observation of time, place, and action.
Similar to the plays of both Terence and Plautus, Jonson’s play works through confusions to culminating moments of realization and judgments. Just like in Volpone, the punishments are harsh (though perhaps not as harsh as in Volpone).
The theories of Ben Jonson concerning literature came from the classic poets as well as dramatists. It is no wonder Every Man in is so filled with influence from the classics as he was not merely well-read in them but he firmly believed in the criticism of Horace and in the rhetoric of Quintilian, as well as in the sanction of classical usage for history, oratory, and poetry.
He thought that the English Drama should follow the example of the vetus comoedia, and that an English ode should be formed based on the structural niceties of Pindar.
In spite of these ardent beliefs, Jonson’s ideas about literature were quite reasonable and at times often quite liberal. In the prologue to Every Man in, he thus found the ability to laugh at the absurdities of contemporary stage realism which,
With three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars;
And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars;
and yet, he was still able to declare that “we [English playwrights’ should enjoy the same license or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us.”
While Jonson advocates a thorough knowledge of the classic authorities, he still reserved the right to adapt them and modify their messages:
I know Nothing can conduce more to letters then to examine the writings of the Ancients, and not to rest in their sole Authority, or take all upon trust from them; provided the plagues of Iudging, and Pronouncing against them, be away; such as are envy, bitterness, precipitation, impudence, and scurrile scoffing. For to all the observations of the Ancients, wee have our own experience: which, if wee will use, and apply, wee have better meanes to pronounce. It is true they open’d the gates, and made the way that went before us; but as Guides, not Commanders: Non-domini nostri, sed Duces fuere.
Jonson states that the ancient authorities instituted conventions, but the conventional limits that the instituted are not absolute. Indeed, the writer and the critic may move away from the conventional if they have an adequate reason to do so. He goes on to say, “For I thank those, that have taught me, and will ever, but yet dare not think the scope of their labour, and inquiry, was to envy their posterity, what they also could add, and find out. Sed cum ratione [but with reason].”
Jonson here acknowledges the historical importance of the ancient authorities who paved the way for him, be he is also supporting a position that puts these ancients in the present world. Jonson is suggesting that in the modern world the authorities be examined and considered in context of the present day writer’s own experience, which has to be placed on the same equal ground as the ancients and accepted if there is a reason to do so. Therefore we can see that Jonson was working in a conventional tradition — or ancient tradition — as well as in a present or modern tradition, creating his own theories and ideas from the work that the ancient authorities left him. It was also his ability to take from the ancient authorities and build upon these older conventions, making them relevant to the present. There aren’t any accidents when it comes to imitation. Even if Jonson’s imitations were to happen without him being aware, the imitations that are created point to the fact that Jonson had the knowledge of these works in order for him to create from the older models. If Jonson decided to use these materials, it was because he believed that he could artistically do something different. Jonson always acknowledges his debts to the ancients.
Juvan notes that borrowing does not mean to slavishly clone the masters. Borrowing is not reduced to inert adaptation or renowned themes, composition or diction. Orr puts forward the idea that “all successful replicators include noticeable variation” and that genres evolve only because “memesis” allows for difference between individuals with shared genetic material.
Anyone who wants to stand out as a great poet has to penetrate beneath the surface of the classics. It is only in this manner that he could replicate not just a formal appearance of great works, but also adhere to deeper spiritual, ethical, and religious virtues that were thought to be buried in the earlier texts. Aristotle called “memesis” a way of gaining knowledge and Pseudo Longinus believed that one of the ways to get to poetic attainment of the sublime was to be able to imitate or emulate the great poets of the past.
Another type of intertextuality is revision and it features a close relationship between anterior and posterior texts, where the posterior takes identity from the anterior, even though it is departing from it.
The reasons for Jonson’s revision of the play could have been a number of different reasons. An author revising a text can do so for external reasons or purely because they wish to do so. Jonson’s revision of Every Man in is an interesting case because he moved the characters to a different city in a different country and changed their names to go along with the respective languages. Editors and critics have long approved Jonson’s revision because there is the consensus that the author controls the material and can do what he wants with it. Marrapodi suggests that this assumption falsifies literary history. The Quarto (1601) is the version that was staged by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598 for audiences at the Curtain; its setting in Italy, satire on dueling, tobacco, and sonnetteering, fit perfect with that time in history. The Folio (1616) version then takes advantage of later developments in city comedy and “inaugurates Jonson’s monumental construction of himself and his career in a collection of works.”
This is to say that both the Quarto and the Folio appeared at certain times for very specific reasons. Marrapodi notes that there have been scholars who have recently claimed that some of the Folio changes in the play — specifically some the cuts that were made by Jonson in the fifth act, happened because of material circumstances: Jonson and the printer had put aside six squires for the play and they just ran out of room.
It has been argued that the changes between the Quarto and the Folio occurred because of Jonson’s temperament as well as because of his changing theories of literary art. In leaving Italy for England and changing the names of his characters, Jonson was giving the characters a truer way of dressing and being because it was the way of life that Jonson knew. Instead of keeping his characters in Italy (as so many other authors of his time did), Jonson moved them to England and in doing so made them more accessible to the audience of England despite the fact that the location of the Quarto was quite nominal.
As Plautus always depicted Rome, wherever the scene of the play was supposed to lie, and as the substance of the New Comedy was drawn invariably from contemporary manners, so Jonson, in his first essay at ‘humor-comedy’, sought to reveal the foibles of his own generation and people. Still the transfer of the scene to England…had great advantages. Since ‘humor-comedy’, at its inception, was nothing if not local in its application, the Italian dress, however thin, tended to obscure the real purpose.
Jonson also condensed the text from the Quarto to the Folio and it has been suggested that this improved the text. An example: Q: Now trust me, here’s a goodly day toward / I pray you goe in, sire, / and’t please you / it scarse contents me that he did so. F: A goodly day toward / pray you goe in / That scarse contents me.
It shows that Jonson grew as a writer, being able to convey the very same thing with fewer words.
He also discovered that he could expand the text to his advantage in the Folio. The reason behind this seems to be that he could create a clearer exposition of thoughts. “The germ of the idea is often buried in Q, and only comes to its full growth and expression in F.”
Because his ideas have changed over the fifteen years between the Quarto and the Folio, that is they have become more enriched, there is more for him to convey, which accounts for the expansion of the text.
Marrapodi
suggests that Jonson’s revision of Quarto to Folio, as a form of intertextuality, shows Jonson’s power and domination over his own work. It once again shows how texts evolve over time and come to be symbolic of certain thoughts in time. As Jonson changed as a writer and grew as a person, his ideas about literature changed and thus his desire to want his work to speak to people and about the time in a different way.
The intertextuality in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour are not difficult to see once one is made familiar with the plays of Plautus, Terence, Chapman, Merbury — among others. However, there is no need to criticize Jonson for this influence and this ‘borrowing’ of prototypes, structure and themes. Intertextuality holds that all writing is an evolving piece of work; that is, it is nothing that has never been said before. While Jonson may have borrowed elements of Plautine and Terentian comedy, there are other poets who have gone on to borrow elements of Jonsonian comedy — and so on and so forth. There is then, according to intertextual theory, a problem with the idea of ‘authorship.’ In fact, authorial originality or “ownership” wasn’t even considered important until after the Renaissance.
If the meaning to one text can only be found by reading the text that inspired or influenced, the question thus has to be asked: Who does the text really belong to? If Jonson is a restorer of the old and has restored a Plautus or Terence play in Every Man in, then Jonson’s work can be seen as an evolution of a classic, though while still keeping its originality.
‘Losing My Religion’
Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist
Many of Ben Jonson’s plays — and the Alchemist, in particular — possess themes related to radical individualism and anti-authoritarian sentiment, both of which are common in postmodern literature. Jonson supports the monarchs and the English aristocracy, in general, which goes along with his adamant conviction that the good of a society could only be maintained through traditional political and religious institutions, and “one of the major threads unifying his diverse canon is an intense fear of subversive forces, especially those which sought to rationalize the overthrow of traditional authorities with spurious claims to private religious revelation, or ‘enthusiasm’.”
The Renaissance was a time of great change when it came to the individual’s ideals and belief systems. In postmodern tradition that depicts a movement away from religion, the Alchemist is Ben Jonson’s attempt at ridiculing “the claim of occult philosophers that human beings are demigods who can perfect their own personalities, control time and change, or perfect the fallen world through magical arts.”
One of Jonson’s goals with this play was to remind the spectator that we are “fallen creatures and to convince us that the first step toward making the best of life in this imperfect world is to admit our limitations.”
In postmodern literature, each individual holds his or her own truth and there is often a loss or a questioning of truth. In this movement toward the center of one’s self as the place where truth is held, the individual loses sight of the truths that go along with nature. The Alchemist shows Jonson reacting against unquestioned faith in the individual and he rallies for “restraint, discipline, and objectivity.”
The play depicts characters that have lost touch with reality. What they believe to be true is not true; everything that they view as truth is merely illusion, which depicts a movement away from one’s own truth as an individual. Even the so-called religious people in the play — Sir Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias, the Puritans who hope to counterfeit Dutch money — have lost sight of what is right and true. All of this depicts a movement away from religion and real “wholesomeness.”
The plague in London was a major threat for centuries, but there were other threats, which can be viewed as equally evil, that lurked in London: vices such as prostitution, alcoholism and gambling to name just a few. Ben Jonson depicts a London where sickness is rampant, but not just the sickness of the plague. There is a sickness of the soul that he is depicting in his satire. Vice is everywhere in London and there are those who are swindling and then there are the greedy being swindled. There are not good and bad in Jonson’s scenario, there are only the disbelievers (mainly Surly) who show any kind of moral compass. Because London is a city, perhaps this is why we see so many money-grubbing individuals; however, it is the desire for money that leads people to behavior that is morally reprehensible.
In examining this play, it is apparent that there are many postmodern ideas that can be associated with it. Postmodernism generally eliminates many of the things that religious people view as important. Society is constantly in a state of flux and this is what can be seen in the Alchemist. The plague in London keeps people moving out of the city to the country to escape sickness and thus there are people like the tripartite (who will be introduced below) who are trying to use the situation to their advantage — to move up in society mainly through the gaining of wealth, which comes at the price of gulling — or duping – people. Likewise, other characters are trying to improve their position in life by getting hold of forbidden knowledge (knowledge that perhaps only God should possess). There are no absolute values in a postmodern world and there aren’t any absolute truths. The Alchemist depicts a world where nearly everyone is devoid of values and truths.
Because Jonson sets the play in 1610, the same year that it was first performed, it is quite likely that Jonson was making some kind of social claim about the people in London. In effect, Jonson created his own plague with the creation of people who swindle using alchemy. In the prologue to the Alchemist, Jonson states: “No clime breeds better matter [than London], for your whore, / Bawd, squire, impostor, [and] many persons more.” Jonson is asserting that there is quite an assortment of immoral people in London; they take all forms. The play was very popular at the time, which leads one to think that there was a certain immediate social relevance (and particularly because the play satirizes Puritans). It is the Puritans — Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias, “faithful brothers” — that consider counterfeiting Dutch money in order to make more money for their church, despite the fact that they are breaking the law. Jonson is making the statement that even those who call themselves the most holy can’t resist the lure of money (vice) without effort. What is to become of a world where even the ones who are meant to be holy are taking part in immoral activities? It can thus be seen that religion is weakened in this world, which is also a postmodern element in literature. Religion doesn’t have much meaning in the play, the so-called religious ones do what they have to do in order to get by — and they are no better than anybody else. What can be seen is that money and status is more important than religion; religion has, ultimately, been lost.
The losing of religion in a society signals the breakdown of society and this is the world Jonson has created. The postmodern movement itself started to question rules concerning everything including religion, society and morality. It is representative of extreme individualism and thus the losing of one’s religion does not have to be taken literally when thinking about the Alchemist in postmodern terms. Losing one’s religion can refer to one losing their sense of morality in the world; truths that we believe to be inherent in people are lost because there is a questioning of society in general. The plague in the Alchemist is, in a way, its own entity — it can be viewed as the driving force behind individual change. It is rebellious and selfish and it takes lives without asking. It drives people away from others and turns people into liars and frauds. It turns people into individuals who can’t get enough of their vices and will go to great lengths to make sure that they get it.
Subtle, Face (once Jeremy) and Dol Common are three corrupt individuals who work together in a manner not unlike that of elements of alchemy and have created the “venture tripartite” in order to gull those who are after exactly what they themselves are after — wealth. In Sir Epicure Mammon’s case, he is also after the elixir of youth, which he hopes to get his hands on in order to be able to partake in sexual exploits. From the beginning of the play, it is clear that the tripartite are doomed, which Jonson shows us through foreshadowing. The three elements of the tripartite do not work well together; in fact, they are governed by jealousy and competition in their dealing with each other. Each thinks that he — or she — is the most important part of the tripartite. Subtle, as the one who has the false role of turning base metal into gold believes that he is the most important. Face is the conspirator of it all, while Dol Common is the immoral lady of the group who falsely portrays a Puritan. What is important about each of these characters — and the tripartite, in general — is that they represent very isolated individuals, each with their own goals that are entirely self-interested. Though the three work as a tripartite, they are mainly motivated by their own greed. If one could do the job without the others, they would happily do so. In fact, the beginning of the play depicts the three fighting over who is the most important element of the tripartite. While arguing about who is the most important, Dol Common begs them to lower their voices so as not to betray them all. The scene has thus been set here and Dol, Subtle, and Face will engage in the scheme to gull individuals out of their money by making them believe that they have the ability to change metal into gold. It is this idea and this belief in alchemy that will inspire the entire play and will be the catalyst that drives greedy individuals to lose sight of what is right and moral in the world and put everything into their belief in magic that can bring them wealth beyond their wildest dreams.
When considering alchemy, it turns out that Jonson was a master of the theory of alchemy. He had read the work of the great masters and was able to give quite clear expositions on the basic theories of alchemy. Hathaway notes that nearly every term Jonson uses in the Alchemist could be found if one were to go through the books on alchemy written before the year 1610. Many scholars believe that Jonson got many — if not all — of his alchemy terms and his reasoning from the alchemical treatises which are found in Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum.
This is testament to the wealth of knowledge that Jonson possessed. He drew on many different authorities: Arnald of Villanova, Geber, Paracelsus, Robertus Vallensis, Sendivogius, and Martin del Rio, as well as a German collection of treatises De Alchemia (1541) and English writings by George Ripley and (attributed to) Roger Bacon.
Jonson was somewhat of an anomaly in his understanding of alchemy (for a person who wasn’t an alchemist by profession). Magic, whether black or white, wasn’t readily understood by many in Jonson’s day thus Jonson’s decision to use an alchemist — Subtle — as his protagonist created a great opportunity in order to wow audiences. The presence of magic in the Alchemist as also found in Plautus’ Mostellaria (the Haunted House), Shakespeare’s the Tempest, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus evokes in the audience the tension that comes with being in possession of a forbidden knowledge (which makes it especially dangerous for the Puritans who want more money for their congregation).
In early modern England, the possibility of magic — or alchemy — was widely entertained, and just as widely dismissed.
Because of the centrality of religious thought during Jonson’s time, the presence of this magic can represent a sort of crisis of man’s conscience. Jonson depicts a time when people were moving away from religion and considering that there were other powers in the world. God was no longer the sole source of authority and power. The presence of alchemy in the world Jonson has created is a substitute for morality and those who are drawn to its powers are led by vanity and greed. Through magic, the characters in the Alchemist are able to envision a world that is vastly different from the one that they are living in. They have created a world of illusions for themselves that has replaced reality and any type of potential consequences for their vanity and avarice.
Just as in Marlowe’s Faustus, the characters in the Alchemist are trying to reinvent themselves in world that appears to be ultimately condemned because of the danger of the plague (the plague took thirty to forty deaths per week at its height).
It is the gulls in Jonson’s play that are trying to get back some kind of lost kingdom by using alchemy and the philosopher’s stone. However, the world is lost because the knowledge that the protagonist has is faulty and because he is a fraud. Jonson sets up this spiritual crisis and in doing so there is a moral message that is sent. Jonson uses alchemy well in illustrating the ambitious and self-interested goals of the alchemist and his clients. Mebane states:
The center of the play is the deflation — or perhaps explosion — of the illusion that the individual can realize a godlike potential through a series of self-transformations and that this perfection of the soul can lead directly to the radical reformation of nature and society. Unlike the royal personages to whom Jonson attributes the power to transform society in his court masques, the reformers ridiculed in the Alchemist are, in Jonson’s view, hypocrites: they profess noble motives, but in reality they posses partially concealed self-centered motives. The transformations which they undergo are illusory, and their utopian dreams are merely indulgences of their own lust and ambition.
Mebane’s statement is convincing since this “deflation” he talks about is achieved in part by exposing the revolutionary social changes sought by the Anabaptists Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias, as well as Sir Epicure Mammon, as narcissistic dreams of excessive and everlasting self-indulgence and personal control. The spiritual fantasy of returning to some kind of “golden age” entertained by Puritan enthusiasts and believers of alchemy and magic descends tritely to a materialistic, mundane, and selfish want of gold and authority.
Alchemy is a way through which a man’s desires can be made real. However, the biggest flaw of the characters in the play is the belief that alchemy will eventually set them free of something or save them from something else. The house that Face, Subtle and Dol take as the playground for all of their deceit is symbolic of the world that can be. Outside is the real world, which is killing people left and right, but inside is where nothing of the real world matters; people are free to live in a temporary world where they believe they can have what they desire. Once inside, there is much promise for a future that is everything one can possible want. The people who come to the house have made a decision, and the decision is sort of a gamble because they don’t know what will happen. It is a gamble on their future. Surly decides that he is not going to believe in alchemy’s promise, but his choice never saves him from humiliation (despite the fact that he is the most correct of them all) because others decide differently. Alchemy is thus an entrapment for those who choose it and those who are indirectly affected by it. Jonson has used his technical jargon from knowledge of books on alchemy to give the characters a certain sense of credibility. Giving them this jargon is almost like giving them possession of something sacred. It is similar to reading the Bible in church; the believers (or want-to-be believers) are caught up in the jargon, in the words of promise — whether that is promise of forgiveness or life-everlasting. Likewise, the people who are duped in the play are promised things through this language, adhering to the words like a religion, though it is “can’t of a fraud.”
Any transformation is thus pretense. The play depicts these want-to-be believers coming in throngs. There are unrelenting knocks on the door, bringing in the newest victims, even before the old ones have be sufficiently swindled. Face, Dol, and Subtle move with expertise and agility as they run from room-to-room changing clothes, taking on new characters, while dashing their victims about. There are no true transformations, however. They are all merely illusions put on display for the people being fleeced. “The pretense displayed is the polar opposite of alchemy’s promise, but unerringly true to its failure to deliver.”
Illusions are pervasive in the Alchemist. Just as the swindlers are not what or who they seem, there is also the big, general illusion, which is that everyone is misguided by the idea that there is something magical that can enhance their lives. There is some evidence in the play to suggest that Jonson was making a comment about society’s readiness to believe what everyone else is believing, despite the doubts of some (like Surly). Face, Dol, and Subtle call themselves the “tripartite” — a word that means something that is divided into three parts, and thus they have created this other entity that is them. It is difficult not to see how this tripartite, working in hopes of upward social mobility and wealth, are the exact opposite of the Holy tripartite — the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Jonson’s tripartite is an abuser of alchemy, of false power, and they use it to steal from people. The play can thus be seen as a criticism of organized religion if it is thought in these terms. In organized religion, want-to-be-believers only have faith that what they are taught is true. Faith is the foundation of any religion or group and it is the foundation for alchemy as well. The fraud can only be seen in retrospect, so these victims of the tripartite go into the dealings with only hope and faith. Organized religion, one has to wait to see if their faith has led them astray, but they can only see this in retrospect.
As mentioned, Surly is the only character in the play that is unconvinced by the tripartite; he is symbolic of the skeptic. He warns Sir Epicure Mammon that he should not be tricked by the three swindlers, but Mammon’s desire is too strong. Mammon is only interested with possessing the philosopher’s stone. Surly is an important character in the play because he is the one who wants more than anything to reveal the three as frauds. The problem with Surly is that he wants to do this, not because of good intent, but he wants to do it merely to come out looking like the wittier or smarter person.
Mammon is a pleasure-seeker, like his name implies (Epicure). Mammon is the ultimate symbol of greed and excessive desire. He is also a symbol of a loss of salvation. It is not enough for him to have wealth, but it is clear that he will use his wealth to corrupt other people. It is interesting to compare the character of Mammon and his values (or lack thereof) to Deacon Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome, the religious zealots in the play. Mammon and the Puritans, while worlds apart, do have something similar in their absolute lack of scruple. They all will do anything to gratify their lust of power: Mammon the power to enjoy himself, the Puritans the power to keep others from enjoying themselves and keep their religion thriving so that they may do so.
Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias are corrupted by their own material desires and they are lured away from spirituality by investing money gained from charity to get richer.
Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias are characters that will go against moral laws of man in order to fervently follow what they believe to be God’s law. Tribulation Wholesome’s name alone shows that Jonson was making a social comment about the Puritans. He is anything but wholesome; while moving away from man’s moral laws, he somehow believes that he is moving closer to God’s law. Even Ananias, Tribulation’s sidekick, is wary of the philosopher’s stone and he rejects it as something dark. He says, ” it is a work of darkness, / and, with philosophy, blinds the eyes of man” (3.1.9-10). However, Tribulation will have nothing of this. He objects, stating that they “must bend unto all means, / That may give furtherance to the holy cause” (3.1.11-2). Tribulation will do whatever he has to do in order to further his cause, which is his congregation, and in doing so, he believes that his immoral acts are right because they work for God. Jonson shows these men as a way of working for them, not a higher good. If they were working for a higher good or morality on Earth, which is what God wants, they wouldn’t be taking part in immoral behavior. Jonson wanted to show the hypocrisy that was going on at this time concerning those who called themselves the faithful. These were the same men who believed that plays such as Jonson wrote were immoral; but if the plays benefited God or their religion, and then they were not immoral.
Jonson’s play takes any spiritual dream that there is and reduces it to a “golden age” that centers on both materialist and mundane desires for gold and power. At first Mammon’s desires don’t appear to be mundane, but he manages to turn what is thought to be worldly desire into the stuff of fantasy.
The play depicts characters who are ruthlessly competitive and their self-interest is nothing if not aggressive, but Mammon — temporarily — is the only person in the play who has any kinds of thoughts of human charity. This is noted in Subtle’s first description of him:
O, I did look for him
With the sun’s rising: marvel, he could sleep!
This is the day, I am to perfect for him
The magisterium, our great work, the stone;
And yield it, made into his hands: of which,
He has, this month, talked, as he were possessed.
And, now, he’s dealing pieces on’t, away.
Methinks, I see him, entering ordinaries,
Dispensing for the pox; and plaguey-houses,
Reaching his dose; walking Moorfields for lepers;
Searching the spittle, to make old bawds young;
And the highways, for beggars, to make rich:
I see no end of his labors. He will make
Nature ashamed of her long sleep: when art,
Who’s but a step-dame, shall do more, than she,
In her best love to mankind, ever could.
If his dream last, he’ll turn the age, to gold.
(1.4.11-29)
Yet this idea of Mammon does not persist into the play. His humanity is virtually destroyed in the play because of his monomaniacal sensual appetites and, because of this, he resembles Doctor Faustus.
Barton observes that “like Faustus, Mammon begins by talking like a universal social benefactor, a man who can ‘confer honour, love, respect, long life, / Give safety, valure: yea, and victorie, / to whom he will'” (2.1.50-52). While “[t]here is a powerful concern with self in all these visions,” they at least admit, “and even show some compassion for, the independent existences of other people.”
However, as Mammon gets closer to the stone (or when he believes that he is getting closer), his ambitions narrow, leaving him at last in “a private world of sensual self-indulgence.”
Mammon thus stoops to the level of the other gulls. He believes that he can buy his dreams with big return on his investments. When Surly objects saying that a real alchemist has to be pure and spiritual in heart — “Why, I have heard, he must be homo frugi, / a pious, holy, and religious man / One free from mortal sin, a very virgin” — Mammon replies, “that makes it, sir, he is so. But I buy it” (2.2.97-100).
Mammon is so overwhelmed by his sexual desire that he hopes that the elixir can make his back so strong that he will be able to “encounter fifty a night” (2.2.39), and he hopes that he can make eunuchs out of the men who will be his competition (particularly Face). He becomes the epitome of the male narcissistic fantasy.
While much may not have been known about alchemy in Ben Jonson’s time, alchemy and knavery were often associated. “Fraud, folly and failure have been deeply written into the annals of alchemy in all ages.”
Jonson’s play shows the opportunities that were presented to people during this time. People were fleeing the cramped spaces of London for the country in order to escape the plague and this gave the swindlers an opportunity to gull people with the prospect of alchemy for profit. While there may have been noble or more honest — at least — alchemists, there were just as many — if not more — dishonest ones. Even with the honest alchemists, there one could find the swindlers right next to them. The presence of a few honest alchemists would be sure to inspire imposters. During a time of such hardship as the time of the plague in London, people were willing to believe anything and that is how there was a movement towards that which could potentially help when God wasn’t.
Hathaway notes that alchemy was especially attractive to swindlers because of the mystery that surrounded it and none but the adepts professed to know anything about it. Those who tried to study up on alchemy would have a hard time understanding the books because the alchemists wrote them precisely so people wouldn’t know their secrets. Those who called themselves authority in alchemy required great detail in the experiments as they claimed that the slightest error could send the experiment awry. Because of this, it was easy for those who faked it to say that something must have been a little bit off or perhaps the ingredients were mixed incorrectly. Alchemy was something that was considered semi-illegal and Hathaway notes that in 1404 the English Parliament declared the making of gold and silver a felony. From the church’s perspective, alchemists were in league with the devil. The thought of alchemists knowing more than the church leaders was something that inspired much anger, but the alchemists were not always easy to find as the people who were duped were highly unlikely to admit that they had been dealing with swindlers, as it showed them in an unfavorable light as well.
During Medieval times, magic dominated the church, however, by the Renaissance the results of alchemy were things that were seen as inconceivable by reason. Hathaway states that even in 1500, the belief in magic, astrology, and alchemy was nearly universal, but there were changes that were coming in the sixteenth century that would change the way that people viewed science.
Two of the major changes were Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood and Napier’s invention of logarithms. These showed the growing tendency to prefer observation and experiment as opposed to the words of authority.
Alchemy has attracted Dol, Face and Subtle to it as swindlers and it supplies them with avaricious people practically asking to be gulled. The world that Jonson has created is one where the real plague is that of the people. There is essentially only one character that represents rectitude and that is Surly. Yet, despite this, the characters don’t receive harsh punishment for their actions — neither the swindlers nor the dupes. They are not hated either, unlike the Puritans.
In postmodernism, the individual is the center of everything. He or she has lost their religion and they are set out to create their own truths that are self-interested. God tends to be left to the wayside in a postmodern world, which is clearly what has happened in the Alchemist. In a postmodern world, magic and myth have taken the center stage and when myth takes center stage truth is lost. Moral values have become a relative thing in Jonson’s play and the characters do not ask what is the moral thing or the right thing to do. The only questions that the characters ask themselves are: What can do this do for me? Can it bring me wealth? Can it bring me youth? Status? What happens is that the people in the Alchemist are thus shaped by the people around them (who are all self-interested) and by their own self-interests. This means that all personal responsibility is lost.
In postmodernism, the truth doesn’t set one free and it can’t give people the guidance or the ideals for a society.
Truth for Foucault is a “regime,” a thing with effects. It is whatever concepts sway the mind. Truth thus becomes the going regime of ideas in a society — “whatever the regime’s coherence happens to be at the moment. Truth acts as a social lens through which one views, interprets, and constructs everything.”
In a postmodern world, the people who wouldn’t be tolerated are the persons who believe in rightness and truth, however, we don’t see any of these people (except perhaps a bit in Surly) in Jonson’s play. The people whom should believe in truth — the religious people — are just like everyone else and this leads to a very dreary outlook on life and humanity. For Dol, Subtle and Face, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of distinction between what is fact and what is fiction, what is myth and what is reality. This has completely been lost. Even their language has taken on a sort of meaningless quality because their language is always about persuasion, about always getting what one wants and what serves them best.
The problem in the Alchemist is that everyone has come to his or her own individual truth, which while this may seem liberating to them, it has created the problem that there isn’t as set of guidelines for them to follow. It is quite literally each man for himself. There are not long any absolute truths for people to live by, to be guided by. Everything is in a state of commotion in the play and there are constantly transforming individuals, fears, and beliefs. Subtle is the man capable of transformation in the play, but he really cannot transform anything. The people who are duped by him (and the venture tripartite) go to Subtle go believing whatever necessary in order to make them rich. Similarly, we meet to religious men whom people probably also put their faith into, but it gets them nowhere. There is majoring question of belief and faith in the Alchemist and it seems that Jonson is trying to force us to accept that nobody can really be trusted.
Performing Gender: Discourse, Power & Identity:
Ben Jonson’s Epicoene or the Silent Woman
-One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one, makes gender out not to be a stable identity from which various appropriate acts follow, but rather, she views gender as an identity that comes about with time, from repeated stylized acts. Gender comes from the stylization of the body and is understood as the way in which bodily movements and gestures give the illusion of a gendered person. This formulation shifts the idea of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that
…requires a conception of a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.
Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene is a play in which it is the characters’ do not have stable identities that are congruous with their biological sex; rather, the characters have come up with their own gender identities based on performance. It is through performance, whether that be through gestures, appliques, or discourse that a character’s identity — specifically related to gender — is come to be revealed. This can be seen most obviously in the character of the title — Epicoene, who uses appliques and gestures in order to be seen as a man (even though it is though a practical joke that she comes to take on this identity). It can also be seen in the characters of the Lady Collegiates who use discourse as well as attitude in a way in which to be seen more masculine (which confuses some of the characters in the play concerning their identity). Likewise, Morose uses discourse in a way in which to reaffirm his male authority.
The main plot of Epicoene can be summed up rather simply: a grumpy old man (Morose) threatens the financial and social future of his nephew (Dauphine) by marrying a young woman (Epicoene) so that he will be able to have a new heir and thus disinherit his nephew. Dauphine tries to stop the marriage without threatening his right to the inheritance and uses his friends Truewit and Clerimont to help him dupe his uncle into thinking that Epicoene — a young gentleman — is really a young, subdued woman. The main characters, in carrying out their plot, use Jack Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole, the Lady Collegiates, as well as some essential stock characters. Unlike other Jonson plays such as Bartholomew Fair, the plot is pretty simple in terms of character hierarchy. In Bartholomew Fair the characters represent all social classes, which adds some complexity to the play — however, the characters in Epicoene share one class. They are all, for the most part, upper class people and equals in that respect. Their division is of another sort: it is not class but gender rather — masculinity, in particular — that determines where a person moves — socially speaking — in Epicoene. The play offers stereotypes of gender, but, at the same time, it also challenges the standards of gender as Jonson has given each character certain “adopted” qualities or positions “inhabited by” “both sexes” that render them epicene.
Because of this fact, Epicoene can be viewed as not only a piece of work that supports feminism, but it can also be seen as a postmodern feminist work because of the idea that gender can be viewed as something that is performed, making gender not characterized simply by biology. That is to say that in acting femininely with all the accoutrements that women wear and by acting in ways that are considered to be more feminine, they will be viewed as feminine. However, if a women should act in ways that are viewed to be more man-like, they shall be viewed as more masculine (for example, the Lady Collegiates).
In postmodern tradition, gender is not biological, but rather – cultural. That is to say that there is a social construct of gender and what it means as opposed to a biological one (i.e., being recognized as a certain gender solely on one’s sex). Judith Butler is one of the most influential supporters of a postmodern approach to gender, sex and sexuality, which is detailed in her seminal book Gender Trouble. The central argument of this book can be summed up in her well-known dictum: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender,…identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”
That is to say that, effectively, gender is not an expression of what one is, but rather gender is something that one does. In Epicoene, Jonson essentially represents maleness in the manner that he supposes that males are the ones who control speech — more pointedly, the speech of women. Morose is characterized by stoicism and a very male-type of silence, as opposed to the female’s more loud vocal character.
This is not to say that Jonson is presenting speech as being feminine and silence as masculine; instead he concerns himself with the amount of control that a man has or keeps through his speech or that which he acquires through his silence.
The work seems to be a play about control over discourse, though Jonson “clearly allies that degree of control with gender differences.”
Epicoene makes us contemplate gender “essence.” Is there something essential that makes one female or one male? Butler would say no, that gender is something that comes from a gender performance. This is specifically seen in the fact that there are characters who desire Epicoene based on the way that he/she behaves or performs his/her gender. When the boy dressed as Epicoene acts out certain gestures that are associated with femininity, he/she is seen as a female and is consequently desired by some of the male characters. Likewise, the Lady Collegiates who act in a more masculine manner are viewed by some of the men in the play as not being ladies at all — but rather some weird in-between gender. We see constant battles over control in the play and though characters like Morose who thinks that he is controlling speech is really not controlling anything at all because he is being fooled into thinking a man is a woman.
Jonson’s Epicoene can also be viewed as a postmodern work if we consider this power that Jonson gives language and how it relates to gender. Morose seeks out a woman who does not talk much because he hates noise, which gives him a certain amount of power in his relationship with the bride that he takes (i.e., he takes her on the account that she does not talk). Morose, by marrying someone he believes to be quiet, is exercising his masculine control over discourse, and discourse is represented as feminine (i.e., the stereotypical loud-mouthed woman). However, Epicoene (because she is playing a practical joke on Morose as orchestrated by Dauphine) becomes the stereotypical loud-mouthed woman and this is where the power then shifts to her (and the men who have plotted against Morose). This is when the ideals shift as well. The ideal of masculine control over feminine discourse is lost. There is irony thus in the fact that as Epicoene grows louder and louder, and the more Morose tries to quiet her, the more noise it ends up making overall.
He can silence neither proliferating discourse nor his wife (finally, the same thing), and eventually, in an attempt to master her, he doubly unmans himself, making a public declaration of impotence that doesn’t finally have the interpretive effect he intends. By allowing his manliness to become wrapped up in external manifestations, he opens himself up to ‘affliction.’ Morse fails to grasp that true manly autonomy is a radically interiorized state, free from ‘accidents’ that can be changed, subverted, or added to: the centered man is ’round within himself.’
Michel Foucault’s theories on discourse and power influenced postmodern thought significantly. Foucault’s theories discussed how discourse can be used to subordinate others. He thought of discourse as a phenomena and this is what gives it power. A good example of how this works can be seen in another Renaissance playwright’s work. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Angelo says to Isabella, “It is the law not I, condemns your brother.” For Foucauldians, it isn’t the individual who does awful things, but it is the discourse of power that flows through that person.
This leads to quite a distinctive view of the nature of the self – or subjects as postmodernists would say — because ‘subject’ implicitly draws attention to the “subject-ed” condition of persons who are, whether they are aware of it or not, ‘controlled’ or ‘constituted. Therefore, Foucault claims that discourse entails, imposes, and demands a particular kind of identity for all those who are affected by them. People thus never play roles in society, but their very identity, the notion that they have of themselves, is at issue when they are affected by discourses of power.
What this means in terms of gender is that if a woman remains silent, then the man is in a power to dominate or control her. If she would speak up, this power the man holds could be stripped away. Gender and sexuality therefore, according to Foucauldians, can be discursively constructed, and when gender and sexuality is discursively constructed, then identity, in general, is constructed in the same fashion.
Gender discourse works in the same way as an instrument of domination. The masculine-centered society and discourse of Jonson’s play gives the men in the play power over women, including the boy dressing up like Epicoene. While Epicoene is silent (as well as all the women in the play), the men have power over them because they have the power of discourse. Discourse gives people power as is clear in Epicoene as well as in other Renaissance works such as Shakespeare’s the Taming of the Shrew. In Shrew, Katherine causes the men around her to be anxious because she does not conform to the submissive, quite role of woman. As for Morose in Epicoene who prefers silence, his power is stripped because he chooses not to be a part of the masculine discourse, which brings us to the groups that Jonson has created in the play.
Jonson has put the characters in Epicoene into very distinct groups. There are two “homosocial” groups. The first is made up of the men in the play (Truewit, Dauphine, and Clerimont). The second group is comprised of the Lady Collegiates, Lady Haughty, Lady Centaur, and Mistress Mavis. The characters Daw, La Foole, Captain Otter and his wife are in a third distinct group — a “heterosocial” one, but they all want to be welcomed into one of the first groups. However it is this last group’s gender performances that make them unfit for either of the two groups. The members of the first two groups seem to work in concert with one another, a common goal in mind, while the third group, however, seems to work against one another because of the fact that their goals conflict with each other.
Epicoene and Morose comprise a group of their own. They are not a part of the groups aforementioned because they cannot or will not join the other groups. Morose has two main goals in life: to live in silence and to disinherit his nephew. He does not want access to any of the groups because he just wants people to leave him alone. Though Epicoene is given membership to the Collegiate’s group, she still remains on the outside of this group because her gender remains ambiguous. She cannot therefore belong to either group.
The men of the homosocial group — Truewit, Dauphine, and Clerimont — are men who do not have to work. They are of the elite class and thus they must rely on inheriting money for the security of their social worth and independence. They do not have jobs and thus they must come up with ways to entertain themselves. The men do this in quite a stereotypical fashion. They have sex, gamble and drink. They are well-educated and are considered by society to be upstanding upper-class men. These men come to represent the model for masculinity.
The men are models of masculinity as they move about the world with the power of their discourse as well as the power in their behaviors (which Butler would say that they are performing) — gambling, drinking, etc. — which allows them to live a certain kind of life. It is interesting to note that even the names in Jonson’s play are representative of male qualities: Truewit (cleverness); Dauphine (heir to a fortune); and Clerimont (a master at socializing).
The ladies of the Collegiate are female versions of the men, though what society just gives the men, the ladies of the Collegiate must work for – or they must create themselves. They are upper-class women as well, but they cannot rely on their own talents or merits to live; they must depend on their husbands for everything — including their own social mobility. Though this is the way it is, the ladies rebel against these societal boundaries. The women are continuously and purposefully manipulating the men in their lives in order to make their own homosocial group stronger. They are adamant and obvious in the rebellion against the masculine power, which Truewit dismisses and calls this display of rebellion “hermaphoroditical.”
The social pretenders and outsiders want membership into the men’s or the women’s network but they remain outsiders because of their social and/or gender performances. La Foole and Daw believe themselves to have the social authority as the other men in the play and they thus rely on their own power of discourse to help them keep this place, but their efforts to do this prove futile. Both La Foole and Daw are lacking in important efforts that will give them access to the network that they wish to be a part of.
Along the same lines, Captain Tom and Mistress Otter would like to be members of the homosocial networks of their respective genders, but their marriage as well as their personalities, in general, “reflect an inversion of gendered authority.”
Mistress Otter is dominating and because of this, Captain Tom is not let into the group he seeks to be a part of. Likewise, Mistress Otter is not allowed into the female group either. If Captain Tom wants to be a part of the men’s group, he has to sneak around in order to be a part of it. He becomes a victim not only of his wife but also he becomes the butt of the gentleman’s practical jokes.
All of these individuals want the same thing: to do what they like and say what they like — masculine powers. A person’s individual and even a group’s success relies on the performance of gender, specifically those behaviors and markers that “create identities, exploit circumstances, and provide the social freedoms of masculine privilege.”
The Lady Collegiates must try to acquire this power, but the men (not Captain Tom Otter, however) have essentially been born with it. The men must then prove to themselves and others that they know how to use this power fittingly. Truewit is the one who calls himself the authority on what these performative behaviors are — male and female. He establishes from the very beginning of the play that it is manipulation and control of language and one’s knowledge that is the standard of measurement.
Discourse is an important tool for gaining power in Epicoene. Morose, Dauphine and Truewit are characters that use discourse to manipulate, criticize and control others. This can be seen in the way that Morose controls how much other people talk and the way in which Dauphine finds his uncle the perfectly silent woman whom he can then use to control his uncle through her sudden voice.
The truth of Epicoene’s gender does not come out until the end of the play, however, it is interesting to note how Epicoene’s role as a man dressed as a woman allows her to be more assertive. Rather than “handle his woman,” Morose must tiptoe around her loudness and her rowdy friends in order to devise a way in which to get rid of her. It must be noted that Ben Jonson utilizes cross-dressing in a way that wasn’t typical of the Elizabethan stage. Rather, it is more of a burlesque scenario. Cope notes that in Jonson’s play, cross-dressing works as a “homoerotic motif only in exposure — and even then it is turned, as a surprise ending, to signify relief from female chatter and the empowerment of Dauphine.” Up until that point, Epicoene’s role is primarily as the comic relief as she reifies the stereotypes men have traditionally believed about women: that they are not quiet and that they do not obey men, and that “the whole purpose of a talkative woman is to dominate males.”
The fact that Epicoene is a man dressed as a woman is what gives her the power to be loud and assertive, undeniably, as the clothing is just a fraud exterior. The Collegiates who rebel against men (specifically their husbands) are manipulative and scheming, but their exploits are never taken too seriously by men and the men never feel threatened because the are not men under the gowns. Because Epicoene is disguised as a woman, Morose is confused by the behavior, but it makes sense in the end when he finds out that she is, in fact, a man. In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, he talks about “The Body of the Condemned” — i.e. woman. Many feminists would find this to be an apt name in referring to the female form. Woman has long been measured and judged against the man, “the active, strong and moral half of a human whole.”
After all, Aristotle saw woman as being “afflicted with natural defectiveness,” and St. Thomas Aquinas saw woman as the ‘imperfect man’ and a ‘misbegotten male’.
The are the other halves that are needed for reproduction and people whom man cannot possibly compare himself in a favorable manner.
Adorning and transforming the body with clothes, cosmetics and jewelry is inextricably linked to femininity and Jonson is perfectly aware of this as he depicts the women in his satire as extravagant, spoiled and childish, and thus men must use caution in dealing with them (which is why Truewit tries to dissuade Morose from marrying Epicoene).
Morose asks Epicoene who speaks softly on their first meeting how she will possibly be able to communicate with “her counsel of taylors, linneners, lace-women, embroyderers, and sit with ‘hem some- times twise a day, upon French intelligences,” or how she will be able to give instructions “for that bodies [i.e., bodice], these sleeves, those skirts, this cut, that stitch, this embroyderie, that lace, this wire, those knots, that ruffe, those roses, this girdle, that fanne, that tother skarfe, these gloves” (2.5 71-73, 78-81). Women use clothing for adornment in Jonson’s play and thus it is easy to make Epicoene a believable woman — fooling Morse, La Foole, and Daw — and it further emphasizes the stereotypes in the play concerning men and women. Fashion is ‘obsessed’ with gender and in Epicoene it “serves to define and redefine the gender boundary.”
Jonson puts Epicoene in female clothes so as to mark her femaleness and that she is ‘other’ than man. Symbolically speaking, because the men are ‘designing’ or ‘creating’ their own woman as a practical joke, the men are showing their superiority over women, in general. The men put Epicoene in female clothes and in doing so, they have become master of the situation and of women. Historically, the corset has been seen as a contraption that is an “emblem of the power of culture to impose its designs on the female body.”
Foucault would actually define it as a form of torture. Men’s modern clothing is rational and functional while women’s clothing (still to date) remains a demarcation of their femininity. Epicoene’s body, adorned with feminine clothing at the demand of men, is not just a practical joke, but it also shows the social control that men had over women. Foucault, in much of his later work, discusses women’s objection to this control exerted over them; there are plenty of women who rebel — such as the ladies of the Collegiate who outwardly manipulate and mock their men. Women thus, even in Jonson’s day, learned how to use their bodies, their dress and their femininity as a way to exert power over men.
The basic plot of Epicoene centers on the fact that Epicoene is a man. Though the majority of the characters and the audience do not know that Epicoene is a man, it is the point by which the problem in the play is solved. Epicoene was not whom everyone thought. At the same time the news comes out, we learn that Amorous La Foole and Jack Daw were also duped because each one confessed to having sexual relations with Epicoene.
Ben Jonson wrote this play at a time when there was greater social mobility between classes and women were also beginning to rebel against certain gender limitations as well. Jonson looks at these issues in a rather satirical manner and his characters come from mainly one class — the elite or upper classes. Yet, Jonson still depicts struggle within this group and especially the struggles between men and women. Women, at this time, were throughout the classes considered lesser-than men, however, Jonson illustrates that he was knowledgeable about women’s struggle (though perhaps not empathic about the topic) to be on equal footing with men in Epicoene. Jonson’s employment of disguise in the play as well as the depiction of the other female characters brings to light the topics of sexual orientation, sexual identity, as well as the potential for gender mobility. Yet, the desire for female advancement and power are completely broken with it when Epicoene is unveiled as a boy playing a woman. This just reiterates that the man is the most powerful and has the authority over women.
Morose wants a silent wife — though not too silent. When Morose first meets Epicoene, he subjects her to long speeches in order to see if she would speak without reserve. Epicoene only answers with curtsies at first, but Morose is adamant about getting her to speak submissively. Finally, Epicoene does speak, but Morose can’t hear her and asks her to speak up. What is funny about the scene between the two is that Morose cannot get the reassurance from the silence that he so desires. After the marriage, when Epicoene turns into a loud female, it is apparent that this “female silence” is just really a manipulation. Jonson is thus saying that men have a right to be anxious about women, but he also is saying that men are silly if they don’t consider women’s silence and its “subversive potential.”
By dressing a boy as a female in the play, Jonson touches on some homoerotic elements via the theatre. Daw and La Foole boast about their sexual relations with Epicoene and are later embarrassed when it is revealed that Epicoene is not a woman at all. By boasting about their relations or interactions with Epicoene (of a sexual nature), the illustration of same gender sex brings up many homosexual and homoerotic topics in Epicoene. This doesn’t just happen between the two men, but it also occurs when the Collegiates say that they would rather have boy pages wearing female wigs and gowns to adult male lovers.
Clerimont supports the notion that the Collegiates may be moved by homoerotic desires: “The gentlewomen play with / me, and throw me o’the bed, and carry me into my lady; and she / kisses me with her oiled face and puts a peruke o’my head, and / asks me and I will wear her gown; and I say no” (I.i.14-20). The page explains this to the jealous Clerimont who then demands that he not spend time with the ladies anymore. The Lady Collegiates are attracted to Epicoene just as they are attracted to the page, completely unaware that she is a he. This fact shows how attracted the ladies are to the wigs and the gowns and female dress, in general. With Daw and La Foole having sexual relations with the cross-dressed Epicoene and the Lady Collegiates fancying her (him) as well, there are plenty of homoerotic themes abounding in Jonson’s play — between both the men and the women alike.
Interestingly enough, the audience is never given an example of heterosexual love, which is what one would think to be the norm in the play. On the contrary, the only love/desire that is witnessed is the love/desire between two men and two women (if one considers that Epicoene is a woman, in fact, to the Lady Collegiates). Heterosexual love is actually regarded by most of the characters — and especially the males — with “subtle but distinct aversion.”
Maus
notes that the “social construction of femininity is at least as remote from bodily fact as is masculinity” in Epicoene. It is interesting to note that the person who comes across as the most feminine in the play — the shy virgin, diligent housewife — is “genitally”-speaking not a woman at all. This makes sense in considering Epicoene as a piece of postmodernist work. In postmodernism, it is not biology that makes one man or woman, but rather, gender is something that is socially and culturally constructed.
In Gender Trouble, postmodernist and feminist theorist Judith Butler writes of the transvestite Divine:
His/her performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates. Is drag imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a ‘natural fact’ or a cultural performance, or is ‘naturalness’ constituted through discursively constrained performance acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex?
In Epicoene, Jonson asks questions along the same lines as Butler. He plays with the possibility that virility is a facade and with the corresponding possibility that femininity is simply a matter of applique.
In Jonson’s play, to be female — or even male — isn’t something that is a concrete idea. To be female is troubled because it is something that is considered relative to externals. Beauvoir’s assertions that ‘woman’ is a historical notion and not a natural fact and Jonson’s assertions that virility may be a facade, is to underscore the distinction between sex — as biological fact — and gender, as the cultural interpretation of that fact.
To be female in Beauvoir’s sense is to become a woman that is a prefixed historical idea of what a woman should be. The body thus becomes a cultural representation, which is essentially what Epicoene becomes and why the men in the play feel comfortable in having sexual relations with her. In her appliques, she has, essentially, become the historical or cultural idea of woman. This means that to become a woman entails making it into a sort of project, which requires that one put on a performance, as Butler has called it. Butler claims that this performance, however, has quite problematic and/or punitive consequences.
In modern culture, Butler considers that those who do not perform their gender appropriately are punished and this can be witnessed to a certain degree in Epicoene as well. The Lady Collegiates are called, as mentioned, hermaphrodites because they are ladies but they act like men. Today, by the same token, if a women is to act in a more masculine way, she is often labeled “butch” or even called a “lesbian” — whether there is any fact to the labeling makes no difference. It is gender that oftentimes humanizes people in a culture. That is to say, if someone comes across as being different from what society thinks that they should be like, then they are not humanized in the way that someone who acts appropriately or what is deemed to be appropriate acts. Gender, therefore, creates an idea of gender. It becomes a social and/or cultural construction.
In understanding how Butler views gender is to consider gender and sex to be more like verbs than nouns. If Epicoene were a sex or gender in the noun-sense, then she would not be able to fool Morose or anyone else because there would be no changing who he/she was. However, because gender and sex are verbs, Epicoene is able to act the part of the male or the female, depending on which she chooses to perform. This is what makes sex and gender a performance as well as a social creation or construction.
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Volpone. I.i.1-13.
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Henry Holland Carter. Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson. (Albert S. Cook ed. Yale Studies in English. Yale University Press, 1921)
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Robert S. Miola, in Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) 33
Eleanor Patience Lumley, the Influence of Plautus on the Comedies of Ben Jonson. (General Books, LLC., 2010)
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Robert S. Miola. In Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour. (Manchester University Press, 2000) 33
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D.H. Craig. Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage. (Routledge; New edition, 1996) p. 468.
Robert S. Miola. In Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour. (Manchester University Press, 2000) 33
Ibid., 33
Henry Holland Carter. Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson. (Albert S. Cook ed. Yale Studies in English. Yale University Press, 1921) 95
Henry Holland Carter. Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson. (Albert S. Cook ed. Yale Studies in English. Yale University Press, 1921) 95
Ibid., 95
Ibid., 95
Ibid., 95
Charles Read Baskervill. English Elements in Jonson’s Early Comedy. (New York: Gordian Press, 1967)
Charles Read Baskervill. English Elements in Jonson’s Early Comedy. (New York: Gordian Press, 1967)
Robert S. Miola. In Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour. (Manchester University Press, 2000)
Ibid.
Ibid.
Robert S. Miola. In Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour. (Manchester University Press, 2000)
Ibid.
P. Hyland. “Possible Source of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.” Oxford Journals: Notes & Queries, Vol. 26, Issue 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) pp. 146-147.
P. Hyland. “Possible Source of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.” Oxford Journals: Notes & Queries, Vol. 26, Issue 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 146-147
Ibid., 146-147
Ibid., 146-147
Ibid., 146-147
Malcolm William Wallace, the Birth of Hercules with an Introduction on the Influence of Plautus on the Dramatic Literature of England in the Sixteenth Century, (Scott, Foresman, 1903) 95
Malcolm William Wallace, the Birth of Hercules with an Introduction on the Influence of Plautus on the Dramatic Literature of England in the Sixteenth Century, (Scott, Foresman, 1903) 96
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, (London: Fontana 1977) 146
Michel Foucault, the Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Tavistock, 1974) 23
Robert S. Miola. In Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour. (Manchester University Press, 2000) 32
Ibid., 32
Felix E. Schelling. Ben Jonson and the Classical School. (Kessinger Publishing, LLC., 2006)
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ben Jonson. Discoveries. 8.128-39.
Ben Jonson. Discoveries. 8.146-49.
Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, (Purdue University Press, 2009) 50
Ibid., 50
Ibid., 50
Michele Marrapodi, Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005)14
Ibid., 15
Ibid., 15
Ibid., 15
Michele Marrapodi, Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) xxxix
Ibid., xxxix
Michele Marrapodi, Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) xxxix
Ibid., x
Ibid.,16
David Chandler, “Semiotics for Beginners – Intertextuality,” Aber, 28 March 2011: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html
John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (University of Nebraska Press, 1992) 137
Ibid., 137
Ibid., 137
John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (University of Nebraska Press, 1992) 137
Charles M. Hathaway, Jr. In Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903) 90.
Ibid., 90
Johanna Procter., & Martin Butler. In the Selected Plays of Ben Jonson: The Alchemist; Bartholomew Fair; the New Inn, a Tale of a Tub. Cambridge University Press. (1989) p.4.
James Loxley, Ben Jonson (New York: Routledge; 1st edition, 2001) 82
T. Joseph, Ben Jonson: A Critical Study (Anmol Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2002) 241
John S. Mebane. Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) 137-138
John S. Mebane. Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) 137-138
Ian McAdam, “The Repudiation of the Marvelous: Jonson’s the Alchemist and the Limits of Satire.” 61
James Loxley, Ben Jonson, (New York: Routledge; 1st edition, 2001) 82
James Loxley, Ben Jonson, (New York: Routledge; 1st edition, 2001) 82
Charles M. Hathaway, Jr. In Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903) 76
Ian McAdam, “The repudiation of the marvelous: Jonson’s the Alchemist and the limits of satire,” Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, Vol. 21 (the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 2000) 62
Ian McAdam, “The repudiation of the marvelous: Jonson’s the Alchemist and the limits of satire,” Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, Vol. 21 (the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 2000) 63
Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 140-41
Ian McAdam, “The repudiation of the marvelous: Jonson’s the Alchemist and the limits of satire,” Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, Vol. 21 (the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 2000) 63.
Ibid., 64
Ibid., 64
Charles M. Hathaway, Jr. In Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903) 30
Charles M. Hathaway, Jr. In Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903) 30
Charles M. Hathaway, Jr. In Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903) 33
Ibid., 33
Richard D. Mohr, “The Perils of Postmodernism,” the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, (Fall 1995) 11
Ibid., 11
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4, (the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 519
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4, (the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 519
“Epicene” Def. 2a-b. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. 1989. Print.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (New York: Routledge, 1990) 33
Douglas Lanier, “Masculine silence: ‘Epicoene’ and Jonsonian stylistics,’ European Literature (Renaissance, 1450-1600). (West Chester University Press, 1994) Vol. 21, Issue No. 2.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Douglas Lanier, “Masculine silence: ‘Epicoene’ and Jonsonian stylistics,’ European Literature (Renaissance, 1450-1600). (West Chester University Press, 1994) Vol. 21, Issue No. 2.
Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, (USA: Oxford University Press, 2003) 49
Ibid., 50
Connor J. Trebra, “The Performance of Identity in Selected Plays by Jonson, Etherege, Cibber, and Crown.” (California State University Chico, 2009) 32
Connor J. Trebra, “The Performance of Identity in Selected Plays by Jonson, Etherege, Cibber, and Crown.” (California State University Chico, 2009) 33
Ibid., 35
Connor J. Trebra, “The Performance of Identity in Selected Plays by Jonson, Etherege, Cibber, and Crown.” (California State University Chico, 2009) 35
Ibid., 36
Ibid., 36
David Cope, “Cross Dressing with a Difference: The Roaring Girl and Epicoene.” 1999. Web. http://web.grcc.edu/english/shakespeare/notes/xdressing.pdf
M.E. Bailey, “Foucauldian Feminism Contesting bodies, sexuality and identity’ in Ramazanoglu, Caroline (ed). Up Against Foucault: Explorations of some tensions between Foucault and Feminism (London: Routledge 1993) 99.
Simone de Beauvoir, the Second Sex (trans. And ed. By H.M. Parshley) (London: Picador 1988) 16
W. David Kay, “Epicoene, Lady Compton, and the Gendering of Jonsonian Satire on Extravagance,” the Ben Jonson Journal, Vol. 6, 1999, 1
E. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985) 117
S. Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, (California: University of California Press, 1973) 143
Mary Beth Rose, Renaissance Drama 24: New Series XXIV Perspectives on Renaissance Drama (Northwestern University Press, 1995) 60
Ibid., 39
Mary Beth Rose, Renaissance Drama 24: New Series XXIV (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1995) 39
Katherine Eisaman Maus Inwardness and the Theatre 150
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990) xxviii
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1st edition, 1995). Print.
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4, (the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 522
Ibid., 522
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