Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age

Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age

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Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age TOM LOCKWOOD

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  T. E. Lockwood, 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0-19-928078-9 978-0-19-928078-0 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my parents and for Beck

Acknowledgements

This book developed out of a suggestion made by Ian Donaldson; in the Ph.D. thesis he then supervised at Cambridge and subsequently my indebtedness to him has been as great as such a thing ever should be. My examiners, Jonathan Bate and Simon Jarvis, helped me to see how that thesis might become a book; both at earlier and later stages, my teachers at Girton College, Juliet Dusinberre, Anne Fernihough, and James Simpson, read parts of my work and showed me how it might be undertaken. As Jonson writes finely in Discoveries: ‘I thanke those, that have taught me, and will ever.’ At Leeds, David Fairer, Robert Jones, and John Whale have all commented on at least one chapter; I am grateful for conversations with Michael Brennan, Martin Butler, and David Lindley; and Paul Hammond, besides other kindnesses, helped me to think through the shape and purpose of the book. The comments of David Bevington and my two other (anonymous) readers at Oxford University Press have enabled me to improve my final text; Sophie Goldsworthy and Andrew McNeillie have encouraged me through the process of that improvement. Jacqueline Baker, Tom Perridge, and Jean van Altena have expertly guided the book into print. Any errors that have survived are mine. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, who funded my doctoral work, and latterly the British Academy, whose award of a Postdoctoral Fellowship has allowed me to complete work on the book. I am grateful also to the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, for the award of visiting fellowships that enabled me to work with their collections; the School of English at the University of Leeds has also supported my research. For permission to quote from manuscript and printed material in their care I am grateful to the following institutions and individuals: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the British Library, London; Cambridge University Library; Special Collections, University of Delaware Library; Edinburgh University Library; the Elizabethan Club, Yale University; the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC; the Huntington Library, San

Acknowledgements

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Marino, California; the John Murray Archive, London, and Mrs Virginia Murray (Archivist); the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library; the Leeds Library; the National Art Library, London; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Theatre Museum, London; the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, for the Earl and Countess of Harewood and Trustees of the Harewood House Trust; and York Minster Library. It is a pleasure to thank severally the staff of these and other libraries for the courtesy extended to me during the course of my research. An earlier version of material presented in Chapters 2 and 6 was published in The Library; I am grateful to the Council of the Bibliographical Society and the journal’s editor, Oliver Pickering, for permission to use this material. Without the support of my parents, Chris and Roy, my sister, Rosie, and my brother, Joe, this research would not have been possible; without Beck, though, it would have been miserable; and Daniel has provided a very strong incentive to bring it now to a close. Tom Lockwood Leeds, September 2004

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Contents

Abbreviations and A Note on Texts

x

Introduction: Romantic Jonson, Marginal Jonson

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I

THEATRE, CRITICISM, EDITING

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1. Francis Godolphin Waldron and The Sad Shepherd, I

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2. Theatrical Jonson

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3. Critical Jonson

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4. Editorial Jonson

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II

ALLUSION AND IMITATION

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5. Francis Godolphin Waldron and The Sad Shepherd, II

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6. Allusive Jonson, I: Coleridge

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7. Allusive Jonson, II: Coleridge, Southey, and Hartley Coleridge

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Conclusion

219

Bibliography

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Index

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Abbreviations and A Note on Texts

1756 1811 1816 BL Disc. DNB F H&S

JMA NAL NLS OED Q Und. UV WYAS

The Works of Ben. Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley, 7 vols. (London: D. Midwinter et al., 1756) The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley and Alexander Chalmers (London: John Stockdale, 1811) The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. William Gifford, 9 vols. (London: G. and W. Nicol et al., 1816) British Library Discoveries Dictionary of National Biography Folio Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52); u/v and i/j regularized in all quotations John Murray Archive, 50 Albermarle Street, London, W1X 4BD National Art Library National Library of Scotland Oxford English Dictionary Quarto The Underwood Ungathered Verse West Yorkshire Archives Service, Leeds

Quotations from Jonson’s texts vary their source chapter by chapter, as indicated, in order to give a better sense of Jonson’s changing shapes through the years of my study; if quotation is from an earlier edition, an additional reference to H&S is supplied. All quotations from Shakespeare follow the text of The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), unless a particular reading is under discussion, when reference is given according to the Through Line Numbering (TLN) established by Charlton Hinman, The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd edn., rev. Peter W. M. Blayney (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

Abbreviations and A Note on Texts

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With a single exception, discussed below, transcriptions from manuscript sources and from manuscript annotations to printed books are given literatim, and employ the following conventions: [-deletion] \interlineation/ [supplied], sup[plied] [. . .]

A reading deleted in the manuscript A reading interlined in the manuscript Words or letters supplied due to paper loss in the manuscript Material omitted in transcription

The single exception to this practice is that quotations from printed sources for the manuscripts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge follow the conventions established by his editors.

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Introduction: Romantic Jonson, Marginal Jonson

‘Ben Jonson is surely an exception.’ The assertion is John Thelwall’s, one of many written in the margins of his heavily annotated copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in the years following its publication in 1817.1 It is a comment made within a very specific set of contexts, by no means all of them Jonsonian: contexts that are social, political, and personal, as well as historical and bibliographical. As the annotation needs to be understood in a given time and a given location, the moment of its inscription in the margins of Thelwall’s copy of the Biographia, it needs also to be located within the contexts of Thelwall’s difficult, changed relations with Coleridge over some twenty years.2 But Thelwall’s contention, ‘Ben Jonson is surely an exception’, has broader and still largely unexamined force. By locating Jonson in the margin of the Biographia, one of the central texts of the Romantic age but one from which he is otherwise excluded, the marginal interjection is emblematic of a larger truth: that for too long, Jonson has been thought different from his contemporaries and successors in having no influence upon the literary culture of the Romantic age. His presence, when allowed at all, is assumed apparently to be precisely exceptional. Is a Romantic Jonson merely, as here literally, a marginal Jonson? Where Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere, part of the very constitution of Romantic life (and its political and social texts), Jonson has been thought absent;3 where Donne, his exact contemporary, was recovered by Romantic readers, Lamb and Coleridge among them, Jonson has

1 Burton R. Pollin and Redmond Burke, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970), 73–94. 2 Nicholas Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: The Road to Nether Stowey’, in Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure, eds., The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas Macfarland (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 60–80; Thelwall as an annotator is further discussed in David Fairer, ‘ ‘‘A little sparring about Poetry’’: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–8’, The Coleridge Bulletin, ns 21 (2003), 20–33. 3 The sentiment is that of Austen’s complacent Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 279); it provides a point of intelligent departure for Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

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been thought to languish abandoned.4 Spenser and Milton, to take a different pair of poets, have also been felt to be at the established centre of Romantic writing’s relations to its literary past.5 Not only is Jonson unlike his contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (so we have been told), but he differs from them further in remaining bounded by his times into the past, not part of the ongoing process whereby later writers fashion their own voices from and against those of their predecessors. Anne Barton’s tightly localized account of ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in 1802’ is itself exceptional in allowing that Jonson was available to Romantic writers as a precursor from whom to learn and depart.6 This study moves on from Barton’s article to argue that Jonson’s impact in the Romantic age stands in need of reconsideration: I seek to show that Jonson, far from being ignored, was widely and variously performed, read, edited, and rewritten in the Romantic age; and that, far from keeping Jonson to one side of our accounts of that age, we should allow that his apparent marginalization obscures a variety of mode, location, and response that, once recovered, refocuses our understanding both of Jonson and of those who later engaged with him. Jonson is a point across which dramatic, critical, editorial, and literary energies pass in this period; those energies are often politically inflected; and Jonson himself is refigured in their passing. Coleridge wrote in the Biographia that ‘the Ancients’ and ‘the elder dramatists of England and France’ did not seek merely ‘to make us laugh’ in comedy, ‘much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their characters’. This, the remark that prompted Thelwall to inscribe 4 Compare John T. Shawcross, ‘Opulence and Iron Pokers: Coleridge and Donne’, John Donne Journal, 4 (1985), 201–24; and Anthony John Harding, ‘ ‘‘Against the stream upwards’’: Coleridge’s Recovery of John Donne’, in Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding, eds., Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204–20. 5 On Spenser, compare Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), and Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122–42; on Milton, a much wider field, compare J. A. Wittreich, jun., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970), and Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 6 Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in 1802’, Essays in Criticism, 37 (1987), 209–33.

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Jonson’s exceptionality in the margins of his copy, had first been printed (by sheer oversight) once already earlier in the Biographia, and before that eight years previously in the pages of The Friend.7 But Coleridge’s repeated statement and Thelwall’s awkward annotation are themselves located in a longer pattern of responses to Jonson. In the Epilogue to the second part of The Conquest of Granada, acted in 1671 and printed a year later, John Dryden recalled an earlier, pre-Restoration standard of theatrical achievement: They who have best succeeded on the stage Have still conformed their genius to their age. Thus Jonson did mechanic humour show, When men were dull, and conversation low. When comedy was faultless, but ’twas coarse: Cob’s tankard was a jest, and Otter’s horse.8

Cob, the waterbearer of Jonson’s Every Man In his Humour, and Tom Otter, the wife-pecked admirer of drinking vessels from Epicœne, here stand as exemplars of Jonson’s faultless but coarse achievements; but as they demonstrate the conformity of Jonson’s ‘genius’ to his age, so they also serve to confine him to it. The ‘mechanic humour’ of Cob and Otter is a matter not only of occupation but of dramatic form; so too do they stand emblematically for the social worlds presented in Jonson’s comedies: the emergent and increasingly crowded London of the revised Every Man In and Epicœne. Dryden had three years earlier given the weighted adjective mechanic to Neander in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy whereby to describe Jonson’s dramatic writings: ‘Humour was his proper Sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent Mechanick people.’9 To take the measure of Neander’s usage, think, contrastively, of the city and its inhabitants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the ‘crew of patches, rude mechanicals | That work for bread upon Athenian stalls’ (iii. ii. 9–10). Unlike the Shakespearean example, which describes and locates only a group of characters, Dryden’s mechanic slides between describing a character’s employment within the play world and 7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), ii. 186 and 46; idem, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), ii. 217 (7 Dec. 1809). 8 John Dryden, ‘Epilogue to the Second Part’, ll. 1–6, from The Conquest of Granada, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 4 vols. (Harlow: Longman, 1995– ), i. 243. 9 John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956– ), xvii. 57.

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describing the dramatist’s construction of that play world on the stage; the adjective oscillates between qualifying the society staged by the drama and the construction of the characters and the drama itself. Jonson’s ‘mechanic humour’ and ‘mechanic people’ are conformably suited: a local observation becomes, by analogy, a measure by which to disparage Jonson’s larger achievement.10 The connection made by Thelwall in 1817 in the margins of Coleridge’s Biographia therefore reunites Dryden’s adjective with its subject; and when, as I discuss in Chapter 5, William Hazlitt in the following year takes up mechanical to engage with Jonson and his editor, William Gifford, we see merely the continuation of a longer pattern of attention. Repetitions of this kind, not merely fortuitous, signal instead the connections between Romantic responses to Jonson and those of the periods that preceded them. My study emphasizes, that is, not a break or fissure between earlier and Romantic Jonsons but the continuities between them and his re-creations in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. Moreover, such a pattern, itself not previously recognized, has also its own ironic Jonsonian beginnings. In ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, written in 1631 in the fall-out occasioned by the printed text of Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, Jonson had banished his one-time collaborator from the exalted confines of the court masque to the less exclusive world of the public theatre: ‘Pack wt h your pedling Poetry to the Stage, | This is ye money-gett, Mechanick Age!’11 Jones, as Jonson attacks him, is emblematic of everything from which he dissociates himself: not a poet but a peddler of texts as small goods, drawing them, like Shakespeare’s Autolycus or the ‘Mountebank’ of Jonson’s own poem, from his pack to hawk around; a participant not in the elegant economies of the court masque but in those, less genteel, of the stage and the public theatre. That Jonson himself would write only one further masque, Chloridia, for the court in London, before himself returning to the public stage with The Magnetic Lady in 1632 only emphasizes the characteristic reverse that attends on the mechanical Jonson: that from which he sought to keep himself separate and by which he sought to distinguish his own writing from that of his contemporaries returns to limit and to mock his own ambitions. Mechanic, on one reading, serves narrowly to measure his achievement in later years. 10 A habit that Ian Donaldson has observed elsewhere: ‘Damned by Analogies; or, How to Get Rid of Ben Jonson’, Gambit, 6 (1972), 38–46. 11 Jonson, ‘An Expostulacion wt h Inigo Iones’ (UV 34, ll. 51–2): H&S viii. 402–6.

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But on one reading only—and most likely not Jonson’s. In his commonplace book, Discoveries, Jonson showed a faith that the verdicts of posterity would rectify those contemporary judgements that undervalued a writer’s work: In the meane time perhaps hee is call’d barren, dull, leane, a poore Writer (or by what contumelious word can come in their cheeks) by these men, who without labour, judgement, knowledge, or almost sense, are received, or preferr’d before him. He gratulates them, and their fortune. An other Age, or juster men, will acknowledge the vertues of his studies.12

Jonson’s faith itself has classical sanction: as it offers solace to other, future poets, so does the passage in Discoveries recall and thus congratulate two passages from Quintilian.13 An ‘other age’ and a ‘juster man’ have here indeed found in Quintilian precisely ‘vertues’ worth repeating and preserving; they anticipate a like-minded future return to Jonson. This faith in posterity—his own and others’—has appeared typically Jonsonian and, less expectedly, by anticipation Romantic: Ian Donaldson and Andrew Bennett have both recently explored Jonson’s afterlife and his impact on the afterlives of other writers.14 Accounts agree, however, on the ironies of Jonson’s faith: too often, unlike the writer imagined in Discoveries, he found himself praised during his lifetime but increasingly less so thereafter. By 1759, in the emblematic account offered by Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition, Jonson’s classicism obscures not only his tragedies but his whole career; he is not covered in classical glory, but entirely covered by it: ‘Blind to the nature of Tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it; we see nothing of Johnson, nor indeed, of his admired (but also murdered) antients.’15 As understanding of Jonson, in the capacious, admiring sense envisaged in Discoveries, in fact appears to diminish as time passes, so, yet more cruelly, does critical attention to that history of his incorporation and rejection by later writers. The Jonson Allusion-Book edited by 12

Disc., 781–7: H&S viii. 587. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ii. xii. 11, 12 and ii. v. 8–10: Loeb Classical Library, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 14 Ian Donaldson, ‘ ‘‘Not of an Age’’: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Verdicts of Posterity’, in his Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 180–97; Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28–9; and, taking a different point of comparison, Ian Donaldson, ‘Perishing and Surviving: The Poetry of Donne and Jonson’, Essays in Criticism, 51 (2001), 68–85. 15 Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in D. H. Craig, ed., Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1990), 485–6. 13

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J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams (published in 1922) covers only the period 1597 to 1700, while Robert Gayle Noyes’s account of Ben Jonson on the English Stage (1935) closes its coverage at 1776.16 Whatever may be its other failings, G. E. Bentley’s Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (1945) did not pursue the late eighteenthcentury record that Noyes had broached;17 and though Herford and the Simpsons’ account of Jonson’s ‘Literary Record’ assays a broader span, at its close it moves, with a rapidity that does not elsewhere characterize their meticulous work, from Pope (1728) to Swinburne (1882) in a mere five pages.18 More recently, although Ejner J. Jensen’s Ben Jonson’s Comedies on the Modern Stage (1985) offered a valuable if partial discussion of Jonson’s nineteenth-century reception,19 D. H. Craig’s otherwise admirable Critical Heritage volume does not advance beyond 1798, a date whose significance I discuss in Chapter 4 below. But why should it matter that our existing accounts are so partial? In The Classic, Frank Kermode described, with a fine phrase, ‘the temporal agencies of survival’, the most important of those agencies being, he suggested, ‘a more or less continuous chorus of voices asserting the value of the classic’.20 Jonson has had his choristers, certainly—Byron called him ‘a Scholar & a Classic’—and at more than one dinner party in his old age (if James Howell’s report to Thomas Hawkins is to be believed) seemed all too keen, in singing his own praises, to anticipate the later harmonies.21 But the chorus asserting Jonson’s value has been discontinuous: he was not consistently, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Romantic classic. Rather, his situation more closely resembles that of Donne, discussed by Kermode in Forms of Attention, as an example of

16 J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams, The Jonson Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922); Robert Gayle Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1600–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935). 17 G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); Bentley’s methodology and conclusions were challenged by D. L. Frost, ‘Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 81–9; further reviews of, and additions to, Bentley’s work are listed by Craig, ed., Critical Heritage, 579. 18 H&S xi. 305–569. 19 Ejner J. Jensen, Ben Jonson’s Comedies on the Modern Stage (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 7–25. 20 Frank Kermode, The Classic (London: Faber, 1975), 117. 21 Byron to John Murray, 4 Jan. 1821: Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1975–82), viii. 57; H&S xi. 419–20.

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a writer who has been lost from and then recovered to the canon.22 It is this doubtful space between the classic and the canonical, so usefully delineated by Kermode, that Jonson occupies in the period I consider, and which I seek here to explore for the first time. It is a period during which the distance between Jonson’s own self-conception and later responses to him play against one another. Scholars have been increasingly less willing to attribute to Jonson the clenched singleness of purpose in life, text, and career that earlier generations emphasized; rather, they have sought to emphasize his regular non-uniformity, the variety, mobility, and change within his career. If this is a contemporary Jonson, in Martin Butler’s phrase ‘genuinely inconsistent in his habits’, the many Romantic Jonsons—varied, contested, mobile—help us further to appreciate the diversity within his work and the diversity within the cultures that responded to him.23 Jonson in the Romantic age is a writer consistent in his inconsistency: responses to him cover the full range of his writings in drama, in poetry, in the masque, and in prose; they do so in ways that, rather than obscure the differences within and between his texts, alert readers to them. From Romantic margins, aspects of Jonson look different; so too, from Jonsonian margins, do aspects of the writing of the Romantic age. With such a changing account of Jonson and Jonson’s presence in mind, I use the terms ‘Jonson’ and ‘Romantic’ with a sense always that they are under taxonomic pressure: I use them as ways to produce knowledge, not with a settled conviction that they already describe a secure, pre-existing state of knowledge. As Jonson is reshaped by the responses of the period, so too is our sense of a ‘Romantic’ Jonson under pressure from others that exist alongside him: a Georgian Jonson, stressing a continuity of response across the period, or a Regency Jonson, allying him with a particular social and political context. Although the consideration of that difficult, retrospective phenomenon, Romanticism, is proper to the study of a particular set of aesthetic, cultural, and political formations, it is not directly my aim here;24 rather, I aim to juxtapose many different Jonsons, 22 Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 70–2. 23 Martin Butler, ‘The Riddle of Jonson’s Chronology Revisited’, The Library, 7th ser., 4 (2003), 49–63; compare also David L. Gants, ‘The Printing, Proofing and Press-Correction of Ben Jonson’s Folio Workes’, in Martin Butler, ed., Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 39–58. 24 See Seamus Perry, ‘Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept’, in Duncan Wu, ed., A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3–11.

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between the years 1776 and 1850, to study the points of fit between these varying accounts of him and his writing, and to see how the many varied constructions of ‘Jonson’ engage and interact. Accordingly, I employ the adjective ‘Romantic’ pragmatically, and with a consciousness of its provisionality, in the hope that it can serve, as organizing concepts ought, to facilitate our discovery of the more detailed picture to which it must always be false: if it can never itself be fixed, we can use it as a means whereby to work towards an understanding of other, more local, historical effects of writing.25 Many of the figures discussed in the later chapters gain entry into accounts of the Romantic only as they are excluded from it, either chronologically or politically: those Georgian writers of the late eighteenth century, like F. G. Waldron, who live on through the first decades of the nineteenth; or the circle of Tory, Regency Jonsonians gathered around William Gifford, editor of The Quarterly Review. My purpose in examining their relations with Jonson in the years between 1776 and 1850 is not to claim them, for the first time, as having been as ‘Romantic’ as (say) Coleridge all along; rather, it is to bring their examples, and Jonson’s, up against an understanding of a historical period, and the currents of writing, thought, and politics at work within it, that can give us a new purchase on both the Romantic age and Jonson’s place within it. In the following pages I offer detailed historicized readings in Jonson’s reception, readings that are attentive not only to his texts, but equally to his performers, readers, and editors; as I attend to their diverse roles in the continued construction of his works, so do I also seek to explore the conditions under which they encountered him. In this account of Jonson’s reception I employ, and seek to benefit from, the contextual understandings of literary production developed in the still fresh work of D. F. McKenzie26 and Jerome J. McGann.27 Both McKenzie and McGann advocate a socialized concept of authorship 25 In this I follow Iain McCalman’s lead in his ‘Introduction’ to An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–11. 26 See particularly D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds., The Book and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), 81–125; idem, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and the essays collected in idem, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 27 See esp. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); idem, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in

Introduction

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and textual authority, whereby the material conditions of a work’s production and reception—not only its purely bibliographical codes, but the material, social, economic, and ideological networks within which it comes into being—are used to illuminate its meaning within its originary and subsequent horizons.28 Jonson, I argue, was located and constructed within networks of attention and affiliation in the years after 1776 that our current accounts do not adequately recognize. These networks are both the product and the evidence of shared, sociable modes of performance, reading, and printing: properly to understand Jonson’s reception we must read not only the works in which he was received but understand their points of fit with the contexts—institutional, political, and intellectual—in which they were located. To do so is to take up the invitation to reconsider from a fresh historical viewpoint both Jonson and the concept of Romantic sociability articulated by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite.29 Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age is a two-part exploration. Part I of my study explores three linked contexts for Jonson’s reception in the Romantic age: his place in the theatre, in criticism, and as he was edited. Part II explores allusive, imaginative responses to Jonson. In both parts I introduce the concerns at issue by analysing in detail the same work, Francis Godolphin Waldron’s edition and continuation of Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd (1783), under the complementary aspects that unite my account. The first of these discussions of Waldron and The Sad Shepherd in Chapter 1 takes his work as a point of entry into the three linked chapters of Part I: ‘Theatrical Jonson’, ‘Critical Jonson’, and ‘Editorial Jonson’. As I argue in greater detail in Chapter 2, Jonson maintained a presence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century theatre far livelier and more various than has previously been recognized. In my discussion of ‘Theatrical Jonson’ I offer a new account of his place on the English stage, drawing out not only a new history of productions of his plays but also his importance as a figure of theatrical legitimacy in the period. The chapter takes the measure both of a perceived Romantic antitheatricality (and its Jonsonian affinities) and, at the same time, the Historical Method and Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and idem, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 28 The differences between McKenzie and McGann, downplayed here, are trenchantly discussed by G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology’, Studies in Bibliography, 44 (1991), 83–143. 29 Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–23 esp.

10

Introduction

real but little recognized place of Jonson on the Romantic stage. In doing so I seek to question the relationship proposed by N. W. Bawcutt between ‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic Drama’, a relation that sees the two in hostility to one another as he argues that a critical engagement with the texts replaced a theatrical engagement with them; I seek also to supplement Donald J. Rulfs’s valuable but partial account of early modern plays on the Romantic stage.30 In Chapter 3, ‘Critical Jonson’, I chart responses to Jonson from Warton’s History and Johnson’s Lives through until 1840. As well as (again) arguing that Jonson was much more frequently engaged with than we have previously realized, I seek to demonstrate that such responses are involved much more in an ongoing debate with one another; at the same time, I seek to emphasize the radical new departure marked in 1808 by Octavius Gilchrist in his An Examination of the Charges Maintained by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers and Others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity & c. Towards Shakspeare and Charles Lamb in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare. Chapter 4, ‘Editorial Jonson’, concerns the making and reception of William Gifford’s nine-volume, 1816 edition of Jonson’s Works. I offer a detailed historicized account of how Gifford’s edition came into being within its political and social context, drawing on his unpublished correspondence with Gilchrist, Scott, Canning, and others: by relating the edition’s concern with Jonsonian friendship to Gifford’s own friendships, I seek to situate its presentation of Jonson within a historically rich framework. Later in the chapter I discuss William Hazlitt’s responses to Jonson and his editor through Jonson’s tragedy Sejanus: I argue that Hazlitt, far from endorsing the claims for Jonsonian friendship made by the edition, reads it instead politically, finding in Gifford’s Tory associations with George Canning a model of political corruption that he understands through Jonson’s texts. But as the forms in which writers are received are various, so have I quite positively sought to embrace a variety of methodological approaches in my work. Besides, therefore, inclusive accounts of Jonson’s theatrical, critical, and editorial reception in Part I, I therefore offer in Part II a series of close, contextual readings in allusive and adaptive relationships with Jonson in the Romantic age. This work, whose conceptual underpinnings 30 N. W. Bawcutt, ‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic Drama’, in R. T. Davies and B. G. Beatty, eds., Literature of the Romantic Period, 1750–1850 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976), 96–113; Donald J. Rulfs, ‘Reception of the Elizabethan Playwrights on the London Stage 1776–1833’, Studies in Philology, 46 (1949), 54–69.

Introduction

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I discuss in Chapter 5, with Waldron and The Sad Shepherd again my point of entry, seeks a historically serviceable analogy for the understanding of allusion to Jonson in the economic concerns of the early nineteenth century. In Chapter 6, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as my focus, I offer this understanding as a counterpart to Christopher Ricks’s valuable formulation of ‘The Poet as Heir’;31 in Chapter 7, I continue this enquiry by discussing the influence of Jonson on Coleridge’s imaginative relations with Robert Southey, and the impact of his Jonsonian criticism on Hartley Coleridge. This methodologically varied work helps to enrich our appreciation of Jonson’s variety in the period: Coleridge’s example is important precisely because he thinks at some distance from those writers discussed in Part I, thereby forcing upon us the necessity of accommodating divergent material to our understanding. Jonson was available to writers of the Romantic age in more ways than we have previously been willing to grant. Yes, Wordsworth did find in Jonson’s Prologue to the revised folio Every Man in his Humour the resonant phrase ‘deeds, and language, such as men do use’, an important precedent for the ‘selection of language really used by men’ described in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802).32 But so too did William Blake’s earliest critics look to Jonson as a point of comparison, finding an ‘accord’ between the two poets ‘not in the words nor in the subject . . . but in the style of thought, and . . . the date of the expression’; Frederick Tatham, in his ‘Life of Blake’, praised Blake’s early lyrics as ‘equal to Ben Johnson’.33 And how, if Jonson is to remain marginal to our accounts of the Romantic age, are we to account for moments such as this in Keats’s letter to Fanny Brawne of February 1820, where difficulties with his pen coincide delightfully with a practical engagement with Jonson? The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it and still it is very much inclin’d to make blind es. However these last lines are in a much better style of penmanship thof [sic] a little disfigured by the smear of black currant jelly; which has made a little mark on one of the Pages of Brown’s Ben Jonson, the very best book he has.

31 Christopher Ricks, ‘Dryden and Pope’, in his Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–42, revised from first publication as ‘Allusion: The Poet as Heir’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds., Studies in the Eighteenth Century III, (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), 209–40. 32 W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), i. 123. 33 B. H. Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), and Tatham, ‘Life of Blake’ (?1832), in G. E. Bentley, jun., ed., William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 149, 214.

12

Introduction

I have lick’d it but it remains very purple—I did not know whether to say purple or blue, so in the mixture of the thought wrote purplue[.]34

More is happening in Jonson’s Romantic margins and the Jonsonian margins of the Romantic age than has yet been adequately accounted for. Jonson mixes with the thought and the textuality of the Romantic age, not always as physically or as tastily as in Keats’s example, but often as vitally; if there is no ‘On Sitting Down to Read Catiline Once Again’ in the period, there are many less well-remembered readings that are no less energizing. Gifford, Hazlitt, and Coleridge still seem to me, as they have to other scholars, the key readers of Jonson within the period, with whom we must engage.35 But the connections between their accounts are closer and more interesting than previous discussion has allowed: only by attending to the fine individual detail of Jonson’s reception can we hope to comprehend the larger picture that it forms; and it is a smaller figure, Francis Godolphin Waldron, to whom I turn first. 34 The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), ii. 262. 35 See, e.g., Robert C. Evans, ‘Jonson’s Critical Heritage’, in Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 188–201.

I

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1

Francis Godolphin Waldron and The Sad Shepherd, I Francis Godolphin Waldron’s 1783 edition and continuation of Jonson’s incomplete, late pastoral The Sad Shepherd is a rich, if largely unexamined, event in the history of responses to Jonson.1 It is founded on, and in turn reaches towards, longer continuities; these continuities are theatrical, critical, and editorial, as they are also social, having to do with other affinities, among them patterns of friendship. Waldron’s publication anticipates and later participates in a renewal of interest in Jonson’s writings through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and in discussing it, I consider not only its place within the broad variety of interests returned by Jonson in the period, but equally how its own multiplicity offers a valuable entry point into these larger patterns of attention.2 For only by accounting fully for the range and delicate connectedness of Waldron’s engagement with Jonson can we begin to address the larger questions with which study of a writer’s reception must be concerned: questions of how one literary culture engages with the writings of another. By attending in detail to the surviving copies of Waldron’s Sad Shepherd, particularly those three surviving copies annotated by Waldron in the years after publication, I look to offer a materially aware account of his work. Such an account, drawing on printed books, manuscripts, marginalia, playbills, reviews, and correspondence, offers us the means fully to understand the interests and affiliations shaping Waldron’s work and, consequently, that of his friends and collaborators: the means towards an understanding of Jonson’s reception that is, in D. F. McKenzie’s phrase, aware not only of the ‘technical but the social processes’ by which his texts were

1 F. G. Waldron, The Sad Shepherd; or, A Tale of Robin Hood, a Fragment (London: J. Nichols, 1783). 2 I take this important term from Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

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transmitted in the Romantic age.3 By allowing that the margins of Jonson’s texts in the Romantic age, both physically and canonically, are a space not of irrelevance, but of debate and activity, we allow also that he had an impact upon the writings of that age.4 Waldron’s Sad Shepherd is a text characterized by addition. After the Dedication and Preface, a sequential reader moves from a text of the three extant acts of Jonson’s play, with annotations at the foot of the page reprinted from Peter Whalley’s edition, through Waldron’s continuation and conclusion, to a series of ‘Supplemental Notes to Mr. Whalley’s Edition’, and, once through these closely printed pages, on to a substantial ‘Appendix’ of miscellaneous additional notes; ‘Additions and Corrections’, some in effect new notes altogether, occupy the final three pages. A brisk, quantitative flick through the book indicates that Jonson’s short, incomplete pastoral occupies something amounting to only slightly more than one-fifth of its pages, and that, by contrast, the apparatus by which The Sad Shepherd is variously annotated, continued, and supplemented bulks disproportionately large.5 That process of addition did not stop with print publication, however: Waldron continued to add to copies of the book in manuscript, for a variety of purposes, through the rest of his life. Some of these additions were for copies of the book presented to others: that given to the Shakespeare editor George Steevens, for instance, in which he corrected errata and expanded the volume’s annotation with long manuscript additions.6 Presented to Steevens with Waldron’s ‘most respectful compliments’, this elaborately annotated presentation copy has its place in, and allows us partially to retrieve, a social economy of scholarly exchange, both literal and intellectual: the copy instantiates an interchange among, rather than an opposition between, Jonsonian and Shakespearean editorial traditions. In two other copies of The Sad 3 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. 4 Marginalia ‘constitute’ a developing field of study: see Beth Lau, ‘Keats and the Practice of Romantic Marginalia’, Romanticism, 2 (1996), 40–53; [Nicolas Barker], ‘The Annotated Book’, The Book Collector, 47 (1998), 161–75; H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); [Nicolas Barker], ‘Marginalia’, The Book Collector, 52 (2003), 11–30. 5 This mode was typical of Waldron’s other dramatic writings also: The Virgin Queen (London: the author, 1797), is a sequel to The Tempest; an unpublished continuation of Massinger’s The Parliament of Love, presented to William Gifford (dated 8 July 1805), is now bound with the incomplete manuscript of that play, NAL Dyce MS 39. 6 The copy is now BL 643.g.15.(1); this, and the other annotated copies referred to in this chapter, are illustrated and more fully described in my ‘Francis Godolphin Waldron and Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd’, The Library, 7th ser., 3 (2002), 390–412.

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Shepherd that Waldron retained for his own use, now in the British Library and the Dyce collection of the National Art Library, he employed marginalia not only as a way of personalizing the text, but of keeping it current, transcribing into the margins and interleaves a variety of notes that I explore further in what follows. This chapter, then, locates Waldron’s Sad Shepherd within theatrical, critical, and editorial contexts, the three focuses of Part I of this book; I return to Waldron’s example at the start of Part II to think through in greater detail the ways in which Waldron’s continuation provides a point of entry into a broader enquiry about the place of Jonsonian allusion in our understanding of Romantic writing. The very variety of attention that Waldron directs at Jonson and at his own writing serves to emphasize the mobility and the interest of Jonson in the Romantic age.

I Waldron (1744–1818) was a man of the theatre before he was ever a writer. In a letter to the antiquary Francis Douce of 26 January 1811, Waldron described himself, with a histrionic flourish, as ‘the retired veteran of forty years service, in the battles of old Drury; \part of the time/under the renowned general Garrick!’7 Stephen Jones’s revision of Baker and Reed’s Biographia Dramatica (1812) offered a fuller account of Waldron’s long and various employments: waldron, francis godolphin, an actor of very useful, rather than splendid, talents. He belonged to Drury Lane Theatre in the time of Mr. Garrick, by whom he was appointed to take the management of the theatrical fund. He was for a while manager at Windsor, Richmond, and other provincial theatres; and one time carried on the business of a bookseller; for some years he prompted at Mr. Colman’s theatre; from which post, indeed, we did not miss him till three or four seasons ago. Mr. Waldron is somewhat advanced in years, and has probably thought it time to retire into private life. In the dramatic line, he is possessed of extensive knowledge, and has not been inactive as an author.8 7

Bodleian, MS Douce.d.22, fol. 36v . Stephen Jones, ed., Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse, 3 vols in 4 (London: Longman et al., 1812), Ii, 731; a shorter account was given in [Anon.], The Thespian Dictionary; or, Dramatic Biography of the Eighteenth Century (London: T. Hurst, 1802), n.p.; the most recent account is Philip H. Highfill, jun., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), xv. 202–8. 8

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There is a gentle comedy in Jones’s account—partly a matter of its kindly judiciousness in evaluation, partly of its subject’s slipping so undemonstratively from the prompter’s box and view—that is entirely in keeping with what, speaking of Waldron’s Sad Shepherd, Jones later characterized as ‘a modesty oftener praised than imitated’.9 Like many of Garrick’s actors, Waldron regularly took parts in revivals of Jonson’s plays; they were, as I argue in greater detail in the following chapter, an expected part of the repertory. In November 1775 he played Tribulation Wholesome to Garrick’s Drugger in a performance of The Alchemist at Drury Lane;10 in May 1780 he stood in for William Parsons as Justice Clement in Every Man In his Humour, again at Drury Lane.11 In December 1785 he performed as Master Stephen in Every Man In; in the following year, December 1786, he was again Justice Clement in the same play, a role he performed, apparently for the last time but not, on this occasion, in another actor’s place, in May 1788.12 This theatrical exposure to Jonson was evident to George Colman, an earlier (anonymous) reviewer of Waldron’s Sad Shepherd for The Monthly Review, even if the continuation was itself unperformed. In this review, which by twentiethcentury accounts was apparently Waldron’s only presence in Jonson’s reception history, Colman preserved the cover of anonymity under which Waldron had published.13 But he speculated correctly on the basis of the volume’s dedication to the actor Thomas King, and what he called ‘some extravagant encomiums on other living performers at our theatres’, that its author was likely ‘to be an humble retainer to the stage’.14 Jonson’s ongoing theatrical presence and Waldron’s part in that form one of the vital contexts within which to read The Sad Shepherd in the late eighteenth century. For all that he handles them delicately, Colman’s review holds and expresses reservations about Waldron’s work, not least the prevalent good humour of the continuation. ‘The sternness and severity of Old 9

Jones, ed., Biographia Dramatica (1812), iii. 236–7. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols. (Bath: Thomas Rodd, 1832), v. 482; William Van Lennep et al., eds., The London Stage, 1660–1800, 5 pts. in 11 vols (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–8), iv. 1933. 11 Van Lennep et al., eds., London Stage, v. 298. 12 Ibid. v. 853, 942, 1068. 13 The Monthly Review did not, advertising a review of ‘Waldron’s Edit. of Jonson’s Sad Shepherd’ (p. 48). 14 The Monthly Review, 70 (1784), 48–51; partially reprinted in D. H. Craig, ed., Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1990), 561–3. 10

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Ben’, Colman writes, ‘accords ill with the overflowing good-nature of the imitator, whose chief wish seems to have been to promote the present and future happiness of all his personages, by reforming every body, and marrying every body.’15 Waldron seems to have been struck particularly by Colman’s objection that there was no Jonsonian authority for his having introduced into the close of Act III, as he put it, ‘the scene of Robin Hood’s bower . . . containing the loves of Amie and Karolin, Lionel and Mellifleur’. We know this because in one of the two copies of his work that he retained, the heavily annotated Dyce copy of The Sad Shepherd now in the National Art Library, Waldron underlined and marked with a marginal cross Jonson’s statement: ‘Amie is gladded with the sight of Karol, &c.’16 At the foot of the page, and then vertically into the righthand margin, Waldron justifies himself (the two passages are connected by his double dagger; the bracketed interpolation is in the original): X ‘‘His [Jonson’s] Argument to the third act gives no authority for the scene of Robin Hood’s bower in the continuation, containing the loves of Amie & Karolin, Lionel & Mellifleur.’’ Monthly Review, Jany . 1784. Quere. Is not the passage marked above some authority for the scene alluded to, which occurs P.66.‡ ‡ It is to be observed that in the mean time between the Shepherds going home triumphing &c, and Amie being gladded with the sight of Karol, the scene of Lorel, Clarion &c occurs.

The objection clearly rankled, and the pains taken here by Waldron to defend his continuation against Colman’s charge are confirmed by the material evidence of the other copy of The Sad Shepherd that he retained and annotated right into the last years of his life. Tipped into this interleaved copy, now in the British Library, is the central printed section of Colman’s review.17 Though not here marking Colman’s objection, Waldron again cites authority in Jonson’s text for the progress of his continuation: ‘The authority for ‘‘the scene of Robin Hood’s bower, &c.’’ is ‘‘The shepherds—go home &c.’’ ‘‘Amie is gladded with the sight of Karol, &c.’’ See Jonson’s Argument to Act 3.’ The two responses to Colman show Waldron under two aspects: not only as author, taking pride in and defending his own work, but as a scholar, keen to demonstrate the authenticity of his source, and the use made of it. They demonstrate a sharpness in his reading of Jonson perhaps less evident 15 16 17

Ibid. 70 (1784), 51. The copy is NAL Dyce L8◦ 5365 Copy 1; I quote annotations to p. 49. The copy is BL C.45.c.4; the tipped-in review follows p. 255.

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in the self-confessed amateurism of his critical writing.18 But they also allow us to recover the margins of Jonson’s texts in the Romantic age as a space of interest, utility, and mobility. The personal connection between Waldron and Colman, for all the saltiness it adds to the circumstances and opinions of the review, is of less importance than the clarity with which it resituates Jonson and one strand of Jonsonians in the theatre of the late eighteenth century. The popular success, both in print and on the stage, of Garrick’s adaptations of The Alchemist and Every Man In his Humour is well known: an astonishing fifteen editions of the latter between 1752 and 1777 are surveyed by the adaptations’ most recent editors, amid glowing accounts of the theatrical vitality of his performances.19 Both plays continued to be popular in print in the 1780s and 1790s, through into the nineteenth century. But it has been too long thought that Garrick’s retirement in 1776 and Colman’s chastening experience as a would-be adapter of Epicœne in the same year mark the end of the period during which Jonson was last fully alive on the stage. I take Colman’s Epicœne as my theatrical point of departure in the following chapter to offer a revisionary account of Jonson’s vitality on the stage in the years between 1776 and 1832. As they serve to relocate Jonson in relation to the stage, we ought also to be aware of the extent to which Waldron’s marginalia, additions to a text that was already characterized by addition, should also make us aware of the relations between the stage and the page in the period. Chapter 2 seeks to draw out the fluidity of those relations across this period, a permeability not only of personnel and interests that Waldron’s work extends and exemplifies, but also a spatial permeability in which Jonson is situated in different locations, each with their own relations to one another. Jonson is present in and mediated by the margins of Waldron’s annotated Sad Shepherds, just as he is present on and mediated by the Romantic stage. This relation of textuality and theatricality is vital in the period: here and elsewhere we see precisely how a position of apparent marginality can inform an understanding of Jonson’s more central position in the theatrical, critical, and editorial currents of the time. Garrick again sets the tone. As well as his willingness to mount revivals, his collection of Jonson quartos was of equal importance from the mid-eighteenth 18 Offence, if any was given by the review, cannot have been long-lasting: Waldron’s Heigho for a Husband! (London: T. Arrowsmith, 1794) was dedicated to Colman (pp. [v]–vi). 19 The Plays of David Garrick, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, 7 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980–2), v. 318–26, vi. 364–73.

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century: by using Garrick’s copy, the editor Peter Whalley was able to add The Case is Altered to the canon of Jonson’s gathered plays in 1756.20 Indeed, Whalley’s edition had set itself deliberately theatrical tasks, tasks that Waldron’s Sad Shepherd later takes up: To enter completely into the humour and propriety of Jonson’s characters, we should as it were drop the intervening period, and image to ourselves the manners and customs of the times wherein he lived, that so we may more perfectly comprehend his various references and allusions to them. But as this is a matter of real difficulty, the representation of many of his comedies must fail to produce the same delight in the spectator, as they naturally did when first acted; and therefore a correct edition, with explanatory notes, will give that satisfaction in the reading, which cannot be so well attained, from their performance on the stage. (1756, i. pp. xxiii–xxiv)

When performance—what Whalley calls Garrick’s ‘living explanation’ (1756, i. p. xxiv)—is not accessible, the resources of his library perform an equivalent service to Jonson.21 This ideal, and idealized, mental theatre recognizes the extent to which Garrick provided the means whereby performance and study could meet and energize one another. Waldron, if his is (deservedly) a less famous example of the relations between the theatre and scholarship, none the less participates in and benefits from their confluence. The value of Waldron’s work is that it reveals with particular clarity the interconnectedness of the various audiences it addressed, audiences diversely comprised of theatre practitioners, literary scholars, and antiquarians: his example allows us to see that Jonson was circulating in ways that we have not fully appreciated before.

II If the margins of Waldron’s annotated copies provide a space within which to justify and defend his work, the annotations made there serve 20 The copy is now BL 644.b.54: see George M. Kahrl and Dorothy Anderson, The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays: A Catalogue with an Historical Introduction (London: British Library, 1982), 165–8. Kahrl and Anderson do not locate Garrick’s copies of the 1616 and 1692 folio edition of Jonson’s Works: they are now respectively University of Delaware Library, Special Collections, Folio PR2600.C16 1616 (presented to Garrick on 9 Mar. 1768, as his inscription records, ‘by my esteemed friend Palmer’); and Cambridge University Library, Brett-Smith.a.9 (with ‘Amen’ in a hand, possibly Garrick’s, following the Leges Convivales). 21 Whalley acknowledged the use of Garrick’s copy of Every Man In (1601) and The Entertainment through London (1604); these copies are now BL C.34.c.59 and BL C.34.b.20.

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also to locate his responses to Jonson within a wider span of critical thought, the focus of Chapter 3. In the margins of the Dyce copy of The Sad Shepherd, Waldron situates Jonson’s printed text in a manuscript frame of contemporary criticism. In the crowded margins of the book, Waldron transcribes against the printed text an extravagant array of critical remarks from Davies’s Dramatic Miscellanies, Thomas Warton on Spenser, Reed’s edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays, and Philip Neve’s Cursory Remarks; and adds to them literary parallels from Drayton’s Polyolbion, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and minor poems, Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, and Milton’s Comus. The critical interest in recording the judgements and opinions of others, and the philological and allusive curiosity behind the literary parallels, make of the book—through its prefatory and Jonsonian sections and on into the continuation—a personal variorum, decorated with allusions and parallels. Moreover, the marginalia lock Waldron’s scholarship into a broader community of like-minded opinion, offering a glimpse of those critics to whom an interested author looked: the volume is evidence of the literary society in which Waldron moved, and which, in turn, interested itself in his production. I return to Waldron’s literary parallels in Part II, where I take them as a starting-point for a more dynamic understanding of Romantic allusion than is allowed by that neutral, comparative term, ‘parallel’. Waldron’s critical connections in the margins of his Sad Shepherd are linked to the book’s physical form. The Sad Shepherd was printed in London for Waldron by John Nichols: Nichols, here printing Jonson at the beginning of his career, was, some forty years on, to include his own richly contextual editions of Jonson’s Jacobean masques in the compendious gathering of The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, of King James the First printed posthumously in 1828.22 Nor, while working on The Sad Shepherd at this early stage of a long working life, was his involvement necessarily merely mechanical: as scholars have recognized, Nichols, who had printed Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces only four years before, has some claim to be considered a collaborator in that undertaking.23 Even beyond these early connections, Waldron’s 22 John Nichols, ed., The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, of King James the First, 3 vols. in 4 (London: J. B. Nichols, 1828). 23 Harriet Kirkley, ‘John Nichols, Johnson’s Prefaces, and the History of Letters’, Review of English Studies, 49 (1998), 282–305; see also Julian Pooley, ‘The Papers of the Nichols Family and Business: New Discoveries and the Work of the Nichols Archive Project’, The Library, 7th ser., 2 (2001), 10–52.

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personal association with Nichols proved long-lasting: when, in 1809, Waldron wished to offer Peter Whalley’s copy of Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses to the Oxford antiquary Philip Bliss, the volume was conveyed through Nichols’s print-shop at Red Lion Passage.24 On the basis of a manuscript note in Whalley’s copy, Bliss printed a poetic exchange between Jonson and George Wither in the additions to Wood’s account of Jonson.25 We see here again both McKenzie’s ‘technical’ and ‘social’ processes of transmission: the mechanical work of Nichols’s print-shop in producing The Sad Shepherd is complemented by his later facilitating the transmission of other Jonsonian texts among a community of interested scholars; a seventeenth-century textual exchange is here recovered and made available through an equivalent eighteenthcentury manuscript exchange. I take up such connections more largely in Chapter 3.

III Nichols’s involvement also serves to lock Waldron’s Sad Shepherd into a rich but unexplored editorial context. When, in 1818, Waldron died, Nichols described him in The Gentleman’s Magazine as ‘one of the kindest men that ever existed. Nothing could gratify him more’, he wrote, ‘than the opportunity to render services of any description, but particularly of a literary nature, and he was indefatigable in his researches for that purpose.’ Among other instances of these researches, Nichols recalled that Waldron had ‘obtained the materials which Mr. Whalley had collected for an edition of Ben Jonson’s Works’.26 Long-standing readers of The Gentleman’s Magazine would have recalled that when Peter Whalley died in June 1791, a short notice of his death had been followed by a longer obituary that recorded his having ‘long since revised and prepared for a new edition’ his seven-volume Jonson (1756), the manuscript (it was reported) then being ‘in the hands of Mr. Waldron, the ingenious continuator of 24 Waldron to Bliss, and Nichols to Bliss, 29 Dec. 1809 (one letter written on another): BL Add. MS 34567, fols. 102r , 104r ; on 22 Feb. 1813, Waldron referred to ‘my worthy friend Mr. Nichols’ (fol. 359r ). 25 Anthony Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 4 vols. (London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1813–20), ii [1815]. 16–17 (the poem is printed, and the attribution discussed, in H&S viii. 439–43; Gifford dismissed it more bluntly at 1816, i. p. cxlix n.); Bliss acknowledged Waldron’s ‘prompt and friendly communication’ in a catalogue of the manuscript sources drawn upon (i. 14). 26 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 88 (Mar. 1818), 283–4.

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‘‘The Sad Shepherd, 1783’’ ’.27 The circumstances in which this transfer took place were described only briefly by Nichols, but were elaborated on by William Gifford in the first volume of his edition of Jonson’s Works (1816). Allowing that he was ‘but imperfectly acquainted’ with the events, Gifford noted that Whalley’s ‘literary pursuits’ had been interrupted by an enforced removal from London to Ostend, the place of his death: It is said that the extravagance of a young wife involved him in pecuniary difficulties of a serious kind, and obliged him to leave his home. In this distress he was received into the house of Mr. Waldron, where he lay concealed for some time; when the place of his retreat was at length discovered, he took refuge in Flanders, where he died after a few months residence, in the summer of 1791.

As Gifford’s account makes clear, it was not only under Waldron’s ‘hospitable roof’, but under his influence, that Whalley ‘resumed the care of Jonson’ (1816, i. p. ccxxxvii). In 1802 Waldron published The Shakspearean Miscellany, a collection that, true to its name, mixed poetry with theatrical anecdote, stage history with biography. A short life of Jonson is included in the fiftypage history of ‘The English Stage’, its text derived from Whalley’s published biographical essay of 1756, and partly from the more recent account in Robert Anderson’s A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (1793–1807). Waldron’s is here avowedly derivative work, his only additions to his material being short inserted questions and a characteristically overblown introduction: ‘Benjamin Jonson, rare Ben Jonson! as he was emphatically stiled, was the contemporary, the coadjutor, the friend of Shakspeare! away then with all invidious reflections on rough Ben! be he spoken of with candour, for his deserts were great!’.28 Jonson, ‘the friend of Shakspeare’, was not an automatic description in this period; indeed, Jonson and friendship come to play a vitally important role in the reshaping of Jonson’s character and the understandings of his work in this period. As I argue in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 4, this is partly, at least, because Jonson came to be written about critically and edited from within the patterns of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century friendship. One index of this is the offbalance couplet from Cowley inscribed by Waldron on the verso of the front flyleaf of his interleaved, British Library copy of The Sad Shepherd: 27 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 61 (June 1791), 588; 61 (Aug. 1791), 773, reprinted, with revisions, in John Nichols, ed., Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London: the author, 1812–25), ii. 108–9. 28 F. G. Waldron, The Shakspearean Miscellany (London: the author, 1802), 16.

Waldron and The Sad Shepherd, I

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‘ ‘‘He lov’d my worthless rhymes; and, like a friend, | Would find out something to commend.’’ Cowley.’29 The friend here was Gifford, to whom Waldron had earlier lent the book in friendship; Waldron’s note stands as an epigraph to his transcription of Gifford’s account of the 1783 Sad Shepherd in the notes to his 1816 edition of Jonson’s Works. The associative gathering of Whalley, Waldron, Nichols, and Gifford forms one of the longer continuities on which Waldron’s Sad Shepherd was founded. Printed and published in 1783 by Nichols, Waldron’s work stands midway between the collected editions of Jonson published in 1756 by Whalley and in 1816 by Gifford. But its mediation between the two editions and their editors is, as Waldron’s manuscript epigraph from Cowley suggests, more than a simple matter of chronology. By either purchase or bequest, Waldron came into possession of books from Whalley’s library along with his Jonsonian papers in 1791; a further portion of Whalley’s library was disposed of by sale in the following year.30 In the same year, Waldron reissued among the exhibits in his Literary Museum; or, Ancient and Modern Repository, a specimen section of Whalley’s re-edited and more heavily annotated Jonson, comprising the preliminaries and first act of Every Man In his Humour, that had first been published as a pamphlet in May 1789.31 In the Literary Museum, Waldron announced that the completed edition would shortly be printed; but, as Gifford later observed, the success of Waldron’s plan, apparently to publish ‘in Numbers’, ‘fell short of the expectations of the editor’, and was discontinued (1816, i. p. ccxxxviii). In private correspondence, Gifford had been more forthright, writing to Octavius Gilchrist on 25 October 1802: Whalley’s first edition of Ben was sold off, and he had \been/ employed a considerable time before his death, in collecting materials for a second edition—these he left in a very crude state, in the hands of Mr Waldron (an actor at Drury Lane). Mr Waldron attempted to bring the work out in numbers, but 29 Abraham Cowley, ‘On the Death of Mr. William Hervey’, ll. 59–60, in Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 34. 30 Peter Whalley, ed., A Catalogue of Books, consisting of, Several Libraries lately purchased, including those of, the Reverend Peter Whalley, M.A., Editor of Ben Jonson’s Works; and of Michael Morris, M.D. F.R.S., Late Physician to the Westminster Infirmary (London: Thomas and John Egerton, 1792); on the perils of such mixed catalogues see Michael F. Suarez, SJ, ‘English Book Sale Catalogues as Bibliographical Evidence: Methodological Considerations Illustrated by a Case Study in the Provenance and Distribution of Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, 1750–1795’, The Library, 6th ser., 21 (1999), 321–60. 31 F. G. Waldron, The Literary Museum; or, Ancient and Modern Repository: Comprising Scarce and Curious Tracts, Poetry, Biography and Criticism (London: the author, 1792).

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he was unequal to the task, and it totally failed. He then disposed of the papers to Mr G. Nicol, who has put them into my hands.32

Waldron’s published interest in Jonson did not cease when Whalley’s materials were passed, through the publisher George Nicol, to Gifford. The making and reception of Gifford’s edition forms the focus of Chapter 4.

IV These three annotated exemplars of Waldron’s edition and continuation of The Sad Shepherd stand as local examples of the broader phenomena that the following chapters address. Although there, for the purposes of clarity, I distinguish the theatrical, the critical, and the editorial Jonson, it is with a sense, as I have demonstrated here, of their interpenetration, of their vital relation one to another. Jonson was read far more widely than has previously been allowed; in addition, the varied responses deriving from those encounters were far more connected than we have realized. Jonson and his writings were live issues in the thirty or so years before and after the turn of the century; and, as Waldron’s copies of The Sad Shepherd provide material records of the processes by which they have been printed, annotated, and read, so do they allow us access to that process of transmission and a means whereby to attend to Jonson’s place in the writing and culture of the Romantic age. It is with the theatrical Jonson that I begin to make that case more fully. 32 Gifford to Gilchrist, 25 Oct. 1802: quotations from Gifford’s letters to Gilchrist are from their uncatalogued correspondence in the John Murray Archive (JMA), and are published with the permission of Mrs Virginia Murray and the John Murray Archive, with whom copyright resides.

2

Theatrical Jonson A manuscript note at the foot of the final page of a printed copy of Every Man In his Humour, now in the collection of the Theatre Museum, London, records that on the evening of ‘Saturday Novr . 10th . 1832’ Jonson’s play ran for ‘2 hours 43 Min’.1 This was, as the evening’s typographically excitable playbill advertised, the ‘first night of the revival of ben jonson’s comedy’, and the ‘First Time these Fifteen Years’ that the play had been performed on the Drury Lane stage.2 The production starred W. C. Macready as Kitely: he had made his d´ebut in the role at Bath in 1816, and, as his diaries recorded, had been in rehearsal for this latest revival since the start of November 1832; he would perform the role again five days later on 15 November (‘Acted very well’, he noted).3 The manuscript annotation, and the document that preserves it, none the less reach back from such a precisely described temporal location over a longer span than even the decade and a half’s theatrical history called up by the playbill. They reach back to 1776, the year in which George Colman’s adaptation of Epicœne failed so dramatically at the same theatre. For the copy of Every Man In annotated in November 1832 had been printed in London in 1776. At that time it must have been an unremarkable book: a duodecimo, published by a syndicate of four stationers, it formed part of one of two editions of Every Man In printed in the same year, both advertising on their title-pages that they offered a text of the play revised by David Garrick, as it was then performed at the Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane; and, like the edition published by John Bell in his British Theatre in the same year, the volume reinforced this claim 1 Theatre Museum, London, Plays jon Prompt; it was purchased at Sotheby’s, 21–2 July 1980, Lot 527; I have not been able to trace the volume’s provenance before this sale. The play’s running-time was recorded as 2 hours 27 minutes in J. Brownsmith, The Dramatic Time-Piece; or, Perpetual Monitor, Being a Calculation of the Length of Time Every Act Takes in the Performing (London: J. Almon, T. Davies, and J. Hingeston, 1767), 59. 2 Playbills are quoted, unless otherwise noted, from the collections of the Theatre Museum, London, throughout this chapter. 3 William Charles Macready, Macready’s Reminiscences, and Selections from his Diaries and Letters, ed. Sir Frederick Pollock, new edn. (London: Macmillan, 1876), 263.

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for theatrical provenance by facing its title-page with an engraving of the actor Henry Woodward as Bobadil.4 The first purchaser of the book left no record (that survives) of his or her name, the price paid for the book, or the location in which it was purchased; but something of the purchaser’s habits of ownership can still be inferred from the object itself. Three stab-holes in the gutter are all that now remain of the threads that held the book’s gatherings together for the first quarter-century or so following its printing, whether in a cheap binding or simply stitched. But at some time after 1800 the book was taken out of its original binding and put to practical use: it was interleaved throughout, with paper from at least three separate stocks being used to supply blank leaves between the original printed leaves of the book.5 The volume was interleaved because it was to be used as a theatre promptbook. As a practical object, the newly rebound promptbook needed now also to be durable; at the same time it provides evidence of Jonson’s durability. In the three decades between 1800 and 1832, the promptbook underwent at least two stages of annotation, which probably relate to at least three professional performances in London. Against the printed dramatis personae of 1776, recording the cast of the play as it was then performed at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, two separate hands have added further cast lists in the margins: the first, headed by the name of Edmund Kean as Kitely, must date from the revival of Every Man In of 1816; the second, headed by William Wallack as Kitely, is dated 1828, and is marked ‘not done’. To these records we must add the 1832 production with Macready, which seems to represent the last stage in the promptbook’s career. What kinds of marking are there in the promptbook? Some cuts and some new additions are inked or pencilled into the volume and its blank interleaves; other markings, not textual but theatrical, record the varied placement of the entrances, exits, and properties. On many pages, one set of prompt directions overlays another: these are pages busy with stage action, with the historical record of entrances and exits made, and properties wielded, 4 Every Man In his Humour (London: T. Lowndes, T. Caslon, W. Nicoll, and S. Bladon, 1776); Every Man In his Humour (London: John Bell, 1776). On the engraving of Woodward, see Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill, jun., eds., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture: A Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in his Editions of ‘Bell’s Shakespeare’ and ‘Bell’s British Theatre’ (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 249–50. 5 Three watermarks are present in the paper used to interleave the book: one, of Britannia, is undated; the two others are marked ‘PM |1794’ and ‘RP |1800’. There are no stab-holes in any of the pages from these paper stocks, confirming that the interleaving post-dates the book’s first binding.

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across a thirty-year period of use. That the layers of annotation to the promptbook are so difficult to extricate, one from another, is, of course, absolutely the point: they are the visible signs of a theatrical, pragmatic interest that bridges the years between 1776 and 1832 in a pattern of connected response. As a physical document, the Theatre Museum promptbook spans a range of theatrical history; in doing so, it stands as a material witness to a range of continuities from which Jonson has too long been excluded. The first of the continuities is that between the worlds of print and the stage. Advertised by its theatrical provenance (‘Marked with the Variations in the | manager’s book’), the printed play of 1776 returned to the theatre to serve as the basis of a series of nineteenth-century productions, binding together page and stage across sixty years. Waldron was not the only bookish actor with an interest in Jonson who moved between the theatre and the book trade: Thomas Davies, another member of Garrick’s Drury Lane company, left the stage to take up a career as a publisher and bookseller, and would also write on Jonson with the benefit of a dual experience of his works.6 In seeking to relate a literary and a theatrical Jonson, both Waldron and Davies moved away from the stage towards print; here, the example of the Theatre Museum promptbook reminds us that the traffic of interest in the period could flow in the opposite direction, from the page into the theatre. The second continuity I wish to explore concerns Jonson’s place in the theatre. The year of Garrick’s retirement, 1776, has long persisted in accounts of Jonson’s reception as the point at which his diminishing eighteenth-century theatrical currency finally failed. For R. G. Noyes the moment is terminal: ‘When Garrick retired and the personnel of the company changed, Jonson’s plays died a natural death.’7 Noyes presents a deadening narrative of decline, particularly for the years after 1776, about which his work is still largely unreplaced.8 Although this chapter cannot hope to replicate the breadth of Noyes’s book, I hope to present a more detailed and more optimistic reading of Jonson’s place in the Romantic theatre than currently exists. Jonathan Miller, in Subsequent Performances, offered the metaphor of a dramatic text’s afterlife; though 6 See Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, new edn., 3 vols. (London: the author, 1785), ii. 52–83, for his account of Every Man In. 7 Robert Gayle Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1660–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 30. 8 Noyes is supplemented though not replaced by Ejner J. Jensen, Ben Jonson on the Modern Stage (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985).

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Miller does not discuss Jonson, the notion of afterlife seems peculiarly to haunt Jonson’s works in the period 1776 to 1832.9 Thomas Davies, writing of George Colman’s efforts in adapting Epicœne, adopts a mortuary turn of phrase: ‘Mr. Colman, after all the pains and skill he could bestow on this comedy, found that it was labour lost; there was no reviving the dead.’10 Later in the period, William Hazlitt’s important review of Edmund Kean’s performance in 1816 declared lugubriously: ‘It seems a revival of the dead. We believe in their existence when we see them.’11 Jonson’s plays are brought back to life in production, or at least partially resuscitated. This chapter aims, then, to breathe a little more life into existing accounts of Jonson’s place on the Romantic stage, by expanding outwards from London, to Bath, on the one hand, and to Tate Wilkinson’s York circuit, on the other; and it seeks to relate the amateur as well as the professional theatre to our understanding of Jonson’s afterlife. Neither Bath nor York were perhaps strictly provincial in this period, though both existed in relationships to the centre both antagonistic and dependent, the Bath season following the London season, the York season keeping time with it; on the London stage, too, we should recognize the differences between repertoires, personnel, and audiences of the regular and summer theatre season.12 The relationships between amateur actors, audiences, and professional actors were fluid, as Jonson’s example will demonstrate. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theatre—with its mainpieces and afterpieces, prologues, epilogues, and farces, songs, dances, and leaps (of which more later)—offered a panoply of modes of entertainment in any given evening far more various than the relatively narrow compass of the theatre today; and Jonson stands at the centre of that multiplicity. What was the relation, I want to ask, between the mainpiece at Drury Lane on the evening of 13 January 1776 (Colman’s Epicœne) and its afterpiece (Garrick’s The Jubilee)? What led John Philip Kemble to pair Every Man In his Humour at Covent Garden on 26 December 1810 with the first performance of the pantomime Harlequin & Asmodeus; or, Cupid on Crutches? The decision in the one case failed (Colman’s adaptation, after 9

Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances (London: Faber, 1986), 23–8. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, ii. 103. 11 The Examiner, 9 June 1816; collected in William Hazlitt, A View of the English Stage (London: Robert Stodart, 1818). 12 William J. Burling, Summer Theatre in London, 1661–1820, and the Rise of the Haymarket Theatre (Madison, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000). 10

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a brief run, did not return to the London stage for another eight years) and in the other succeeded (Kemble’s receipts were almost three times higher than those for the performance of Every Man In his Humour on 2 November 1810, when Rosina had been the afterpiece); but the relation of Jonson to that failure or success, as in other instances I discuss, is not immediately clear. In writing of such productions, the temptation is to locate Jonson not dead centre but in the margins of the Romantic stage. Where does he truly belong?13

I Gloomily annotating a copy of the playbill that had advertised the first night of George Colman’s adapted Epicœne, the Drury Lane prompter, William Hopkins, wrote: Characters New Dressed in the Habits of the Times. This play is alter’d by Mr Colman and receiv’d with Some Applause, but it don’t seem to hit the present Taste a few hisses at the End.14

The failure of Colman’s Epicœne registered in Hopkins’s note has dissuaded scholars from enquiring into the rationale for the production and the reasons for its failure. Epicœne marks, in existing accounts, a terminal point for Jonson’s late eighteenth-century reputation: Garrick’s sale soon after of his Drury Lane interests and his retirement too conveniently allow the production to end-stop the remarkable period inaugurated by the actor’s d´ebut in 1747 during which Every Man In his Humour was performed 157 times on the London stage.15 It is time to reconsider the four performances at Drury Lane to which Hopkins’s note relates. Hopkins’s brief note raises larger issues. What are the relationships between ‘New Dressed’ characters and ‘the Habits of the Times’? The 13 In answering this question I have benefited from renewed scholarly attention to the Romantic stage, and in particular Robert D. Hume, ed., The London Theatre World, 1660–1800 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980); Jonathan Bate, ‘The Romantic Stage’, in Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, eds., Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 92–111; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 325–423; and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 14 William Van Lennep et al., eds., The London Stage, 1660–1800, 5 pts. in 11 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–8), v. 1944. 15 George Winchester Stone, ‘The Making of the Repertory’ in Hume, ed., The London Theatre World, 181–209.

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‘habits’ of Hopkins’s note imply modes of behaviour, expression, and reference as they do fashions of dress or theatrical costume. But which time: the 1609 of the play’s first performance? or the 1776 of its revival? The same ambiguity hovers around the word ‘fashion’ in Garrick’s letter to Colman after the failure of the revival when he commented that ‘the impossibility of giving it a fashion was felt by you as well as myself’.16 Fashion here is not just dress or costume, but dramatic or theatrical shape. In fact, we can be certain that the production was staged in at least an approximation of seventeenth-century dress, for the Westminster Magazine recorded the ‘great expence which the managers have been at in habiting the whole dramatis personae in splendid and characteristic Old English dresses’.17 The younger Colman, printing his father’s correspondence with Garrick in 1820, annotated that relating to Epicœne with an emphasis that none the less questioned such a choice: ‘Ben Jonson was, in the first place, a pedant,—and, in the second, gave the humours of his day. Few of such a Dramatist’s writings can long keep the stage.’18 Colman’s first objection suggests that Jonson’s plays were so specific in their range of historical reference that they required not performance but historical excavation. The relation between the modernity of the eighteenth-century present and the historically bound Jacobean London of Jonson’s play brings to the foreground a familiar strain of criticism: that Jonson’s plays were grounded so much in their own time that they were beyond historical recovery. But if this was the case, why stage (as Garrick did) a deliberately historicized performance? An anonymous reviewer for The London Magazine nicely caught the point at issue when remarking that Epicœne, as revised, was ‘neither Ben Jonson’s, nor Colman’s; but remains of the doubtful gender’.19 This, as it teases out the relations of gender and genre, is a knowing joke on the gender games of Epicœne, but also something more. The casting of Sarah Siddons as Epicœne—a part written for a boy—was controversial, and the impact of this casting can be recovered only by a return to an earlier tradition.20 The production of Epicœne watched by Samuel Pepys on 16 NAL MS F.48.F.16, item 13 (27 May 1776); printed, with variations, in George Colman the Younger, ed., Posthumous Letters from Various Celebrated Men; Addressed to Francis Colman, and George Colman, the Elder (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1820), 319. 17 The Westminster Magazine (Jan. 1776), 29–30. 18 Colman, ed., Posthumous Letters, 321. 19 The London Magazine, 45 (1776), 48–50. 20 One piece of evidence is unlocated: an anonymous engraving after an anonymous portrait of ‘siddons (Mrs.), as Epicœne in Epicœne’, reported by Francis Harvey as being

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the evening of 7 January 1661 highlights the range required of the actor playing Epicœne: Tom and I and my wife to the Theatre and there saw The Silent Woman, the first time that ever I did see it and it is an excellent play. Among other things here, Kinaston the boy hath the good turn to appear in three shapes: 1, as a poor woman in ordinary clothes to please Morose; then in fine clothes as a gallant, and in them was clearly the prettiest woman in the whole house—and lastly, as a man; and then likewise did appear the handsomest man in the house.21

The Restoration theatre, however, saw in the part of Epicœne an opportunity for the display of its novel commodity: the female actress. When Pepys saw the play again on 19 September 1668, Mrs Knepp played Epicœne: she ‘did her part’, Pepys thought, ‘mighty well’ (Knepp was one of his favourites). The Diary entries are important, for they demonstrate the extent to which Epicœne was already, both on- and off-stage, a play of sexual attraction, even if that attention is often thwarted or misdirected. Pepys’s ‘prettiest’ and ‘handsomest’ locate the play within a gendered economy of sexualized performance, an economy that was consistent between the Restoration and the late eighteenth-century stage. Sarah Siddons’s engagement in the role of Epicœne was on the recommendation of Garrick’s friend the Reverend Henry Bate, who, at Garrick’s request, had seen her perform at Cheltenham as Rosalind in As You Like It.22 Even from his place in the wings, ‘under almost every disadvantage’, Bate thought her remarkable: I own she made so strong an impression upon me, that I think she can not fail to be a valuable acquisition to Drury Lane. Her figure must be remarkably fine, when she is happily divested of a big-belly, which entirely mars for the present her whole shape.—her face (if I could judge from where I saw it) is one of the most strikingly beautiful for stage effect that ever I beheld: but I shall surprise you more, when I assure you that these are nothing to her action, and general stage deportment which are remarkably pleasing & characteristic: in short I know [-of]

bound in an extra-illustrated set of Genest’s English Stage then in the possession of James McHenry (List of Portraits, Views, etc. Contained in This Illustrated Copy of Genest’s History of the English Stage, 1600–1830 (London: the author, 1876), 101). 21 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 10 vols. (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1970–83), ii. 7. 22 Garrick’s letter to Bate, 31 July 1775, is now Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, MS Y.c.2600 (194); a partial facsimile is in Heather Wolfe, ed., ‘The Pen’s Excellencie’: Treasures from the Manuscript Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2002), 162.

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no woman who marks the different passages & transitions with so much variety & at the same time/propriety of expression.23

Bate’s second letter sought to reassure Garrick about Siddons’s figure: ‘Now for the Big Belly:—she has already gone Six Months, so that pretty early in December, she will be fit for service.’24 Bate’s tributes to Siddons’s ‘variety’ and professional skill (with memories, perhaps, of Cleopatra’s ‘infinite variety’), are here brought up against the languages of the military (‘fit for service’), of finance (‘acquisition’), gender, sexuality (‘service’, in a rather different sense), and aesthetics (both of the body and of theatrical criticism). They create a network of discourses within which Siddons is located; and they will become the discourses of Colman’s Epicœne no less forcefully. Siddons’s Reminiscences, though they are alive with the memory of the ‘spite and malevolence’ directed at her by the long-established actresses at Drury Lane, Mrs Yates and Miss Young, are silent about Epicœne.25 In fact, she made her poorly received d´ebut in 1775 as Portia, after which, as Percy Fitzgerald wrote in 1875, Epicœne ‘was a second failure, was almost certain to be so, and it was foolish to have attempted such a character’.26 Part of the problem with Siddons’s Portia had been her inaudibility, a quality that should have made her the perfect choice for The Silent Woman. Thomas Campbell, in his Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834), reprinted a contemporary account of her d´ebut: ‘She spoke in a broken tremulous tone; and at the close of a sentence her words generally lapsed into a horrid whisper, that was absolutely inaudible.’27 The Silent Woman? Colman’s Morose, in his first interview with Epicœne, asks especially after her voice as ‘He goes about her, and views her’. Epicœne’s response delights him: ‘She speaks softly’, as the stage directions have it. Morose

23 BL Add. MS 25383, fol. 1r (12 Aug. 1775); neither this letter nor the following one are collected in The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831). 24 BL Add. MS 25383, fol. 3r (19 Aug. 1775). 25 The Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773–1785, ed. William Van Lennep (Cambridge, Mass.: Widener Library, 1942), 5. 26 Percy Fitzgerald, The Kembles, 2 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, [1875]), i. 55. Fitzgerald is, none the less, the first biographer to discuss her performance in this role: James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), elides her part in Epicœne, following Colman’s printed text of the play in 1776 (see below); Boaden is followed in this omission by Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834). 27 Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, i. 68.

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struggles to hear her: ‘What say you, lady? Good lady, speak out.’28 When Siddons spoke out in her Reminiscences, she declared that Garrick’s ‘chief object in his exaltation of poor me . . . was the mortification and irritation of Mrs . Yates and Miss Younge’.29 Silenced, she found herself a piece in another’s game, just as Epicœne is, finally, a part only of Dauphine’s strategy in Jonson’s play. Scholars now situate Siddons’s career within a broader account of the place held by the actress on the late eighteenth-century stage; but the 1776 revival of Epicœne, a theatrical and cultural event that interacts with exactly such a network of issues, has been curiously absent from such accounts.30 In January 1776, Siddons’s Epicœne must have created conditions of understanding in which such casual misogyny as is performed and satirized in Jonson’s play was brought up against the actuality of the staged female body within a discourse of acquisition and service. Epicœne ‘new Dressed’ had a power of interaction with the present in which it was staged that went beyond its historically coded Jacobean theatrical and social contexts. As Epicœne’s very quietness is, in 1776, a parody of Siddons’s, so are Siddons’s sexuality and gender, so far to the front in the Bate–Garrick letters, caught up into the play, adding to the disruption with which Jonson’s text was already engaged. The modernity of the adapted play has everything to do with the theatrical contexts in which it was performed; and in that manner releases the dramatic power of Jonson’s play. After the third performance, in which receipts fell dramatically, Garrick ended Siddons’s short run as Epicœne.31 At the close of that short run, he received a letter from the Reverend John Hoadley stating his opinion about performance: For that, & all other Reasons in the World, I wd . by no means have Epicœne acted by a Woman. A Young Smooth=Face certainly, if You have one in the Company. The Force is entirely lost by it’s being acted by a Woman. Sex is so strong in every

28

Epicœne; or, The Silent Woman, rev. George Colman (London: T. Becket, 1776), 24–5. Siddons, Reminiscences, ed. Van Lennep, 4–5. 30 See, most recently, Shearer West, ‘The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons’, and Robyn Asleson, ‘ ‘‘She Was Tragedy Personified’’: Crafting the Siddons Legend in Art and Life’, in Robyn Asleson, ed., A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and her Portraitists (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 1–40 and 41–96; and Gill Perry, ‘Ambiguity and Desire: Metaphors of Sexuality in Late Eighteenth-Century Representations of the Actress’, in Robyn Asleson, ed., Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 57–80. 31 Van Lennep et al., eds., London Stage, v. 1945. 29

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body’s Mind, especially of your more vulgar Hearers, that it is impossible to be separated.32

In response to Hoadley’s suggestion, Garrick cast the young French actor Philip Lamash as Epicœne; and though Lamash would, a decade later, play Bobadil with some success in Edinburgh, his Jonsonian d´ebut on 23 January 1776 lasted only one night to Siddons’s three.33 This second failure of the recast play had a very Jonsonian ring to it. John Genest, considering Garrick’s casting from the vantage-point of 1832, confirmed Hoadley’s opinion: ‘Garrick was injudicious in giving the character of Epicœne to a woman; his reason for so doing, was doubtless because it had been uniformly played by a woman from 1664—it is clear from the cast of the play that its failure was not owing to the actors or the manager—the fault was solely in the audience.’34 Jonson suffers, in Hoadley’s and Genest’s accounts (as he had in his lifetime), from his audiences—the ‘more vulgar Hearers’ of Hoadley’s letter. But it remains the case that even this blanket denunciation of the Drury Lane audience does not hold quite true: although, after the third Siddons performance of Epicœne on 17 January that play was left off for a further week, the immediately following night’s play, The Alchemist on 18 January, was a success.35 Garrick, writing to Colman after the event, summed up the play’s failure: ‘The Silent Woman with all our care did not succeed and was left off under charges at the 4th . night, tho’ we added the Jubilee to it—the impossibility of giving it a fashion was felt by you as well as myself.’36

32 NAL MS F.48.F.38, item 43; printed, with variations, in Garrick, Private Correspondence, ii. 123–4. The letter, though dated 14 Jan., was not postmarked until 17 Jan. 1776, the last day on which Siddons performed as Epicœne: its arrival in London after Siddons’s run in the play had ended therefore suggests that it prompted Garrick to experiment with Lamash, a factor that has not previously been recognized. 33 Philip H. Highfill, jun., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), ix. 127–30. 34 John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols. (Bath: Thomas Rodd, 1832), v. 486. 35 Hopkins, the prompter, noted the reason: ‘When Face ask’d Drugger if he had any Interest with the Players—Mr G. answer’d I believe I had once but don’t know if I have now or not—It had a good Effect—his having Just Sold his Share of the Patent’ (Van Lennep et al., eds., London Stage, v. 1945). 36 NAL MS F.48.F.16, item 13 (27 May 1776); printed, with variations, in Colman, ed., Posthumous Letters, 319.

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Fashion—clothing, shape, and current popularity all in one—here works against Jonson. But so too does The Jubilee, Garrick’s central authorial contribution to the cult of eighteenth-century Bardolatry, which makes a fascinating afterpiece to Colman’s Epicœne, creating an evening’s entertainment at Drury Lane of familiar dimensions, as it pairs the failure of Jonson with the success of Shakespeare. Garrick’s two-act afterpiece, The Jubilee (1769), with its closing injunction—‘Bravo Jubilee! | Shakespeare forever!’—staged and capitalized on the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford of 1769.37 The Jubilee closes with a roundelay, the first stanza of which is given to Venus. For the revival in 1776, Garrick cast Siddons as Venus; the casting was (predictably) not received favourably by her fellow actresses. This gained me the malicious apellation [sic] of Garrick’s Venus and the ladies who so kindly bestowed it on me, so determinedly rushed before me in the last scene, that had he not broken through them all, and brought us forward with his own hand, my little Cupid and my self, whose appointed situations were in the very front of the stage, might as well have been in the Island of Paphos at that moment.38

As striking as the professional jealousy recalled here by Siddons is, the clash between the roles she played in the same evening: Epicœne to Venus goes beyond the transformations required even in Epicœne. But Jonson, if not quite in Paphos, was apparently a long way from centre stage in all this, as a poem in Shakespeare’s Garland (1769), a collection of the songs from The Jubilee and some related poetry, demonstrates. ‘The Dramatic Race. A Catch’, figures Shakespeare as a runner (or perhaps a rider) in his own celebratory race; in a much reduced field, his only competitor is Jonson: clear, clear the course—make room—make room I say! Now they are off, and Jonson makes the play. I’ll bet the odds—done sir, with you and you; shakespeare keeps near him—and he’ll win it too: Here’s even money—done for a hundred, done— Now Jonson! now, or never—he has won.

37 For the standard account of the events at Stratford, see Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: Michael Joseph, 1964); and for a stimulating critical account of their afterlife, Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet; Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 214–32. 38 Siddon, Reminiscences, ed. Van Lennep, 5–6.

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If the result in 1769 had been open to question—Shakespeare, on the commentator’s oath, has come in ahead of Jonson, but the referent of ‘he has won’ is still grammatically undecidable—the contrast of the revived Epicœne and Jubilee would seem to put the matter absolutely beyond doubt. But my argument throughout this chapter is that the historical record complicates the certainty of such a position, as the poem itself also does. The 1776 Epicœne, rather than signalling the close of Jonson’s theatrical vitality, raises fascinating questions about both theatrical and social contexts, which illuminate the evolution of Jonson’s theatrical afterlife in the Romantic period. The text of Colman’s adapted Epicœne, published later in 1776, is Jonsonian in more than simply its text: the book’s paratexts, and their performance of grumpy, wounded authorial amour propre, are of a piece with many similar defensive manœuvres in Jonson’s quartos. But, as with Jonson, Colman’s ‘Advertisement’ to Epicœne reveals more than simply disgruntlement: it speaks to a conception of the theatre that is deliberately Jonsonian, concerned to teach as well as to delight. He defends his adaptation by aligning it with other writers ‘of the most distinguished taste and genius’ who have expended ‘the most lavish encomiums’ on Jonson’s play; but he also elevates the adaptation, despite his thanks for ‘the kind assistance’ of Garrick, into an explicit attack on the state of the contemporary stage: ‘The Editor of the following Comedy always considered it as on the principal duties of a Director of a Theatre, to atone, in some measure, for the mummery which his situation obliges him to exhibit.’ Colman’s conception of his ‘duties’ speaks to a hierarchical conception of stage drama that moves beyond the purely commercial imperatives of the manager’s obligations. At Covent Garden in the first decades of the next century, Colman’s account of Jonson’s legitimating authority would be taken up by John Philip Kemble. As it moves Epicœne away from the necessities of financial success, Colman’s adaptation also transfers the text from stage to page, from performance to print: he refuses to apologize for having ‘promoted the revival of Epicœne; the perusal of which he recommends in the Closet, to those acute spirits who thought it unworthy the Stage’. The antitheatrical turn

39 David Garrick et al., Shakespeare’s Garland (London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1769), 16.

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of Colman’s ‘Advertisement’—it closes with a quotation from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism—keeps company with many such turns in Jonson. But it gives a false impression of the reality of the persistence of Jonson’s play on the stage and its capacity to resist being isolated from the theatrical currents of the day.40 The significance of Epicœne in the mainstream theatre, despite Siddons’s flop, can be demonstrated through its relation to Sheridan. R. Crompton Rhodes in 1928 first suggested that Colman’s Epicœne had played some part in the complicated genesis of R. B. Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1776). Rhodes suggested that the Collegiate Ladies of Jonson’s play had given Sheridan the cue for his own ‘Scandalous College’, an allusion that was at once literary and contemporary, since in 1776 the ladies club then meeting at ‘the Thatcht House in St. James’s’ provided a local point to the reference.41 Colman’s ‘Prologue’ to his revised Epicœne hints as much: To-night, if you would feast your eyes and ears, Go back in fancy near two hundred years; A play of Ruffs and Farthingales review, Old English fashions, such as then were new! Drive not Tom Otter’s Bulls and Bears away; Worse Bulls and Bears disgrace the present day. On fair Collegiates let no critick frown! A Ladies’ Club still hold its rank in town.42

The Town and Country Magazine noted this, ‘a happy comparison of the present bulls and bears of’ Change-alley to those of Tom Otter, and the Cotterie [sic] of the present ton [sic] to that of the College Ladies in the days of Ben Johnson’.43 So too it is possible to support Rhodes’s suggestion of Sheridan’s dramatic indebtedness to Jonson from other sources: traces of Jonson are clearly evident in the manuscript drafts that lie behind The School for Scandal.44 Thomas Moore (Sheridan’s 40

Epicœne (1776), sig. A3r . The Plays & Poems of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. R. Crompton Rhodes, 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1928), ii. 140–1. I have not been able to locate Rhodes’s source for this gathering: it is not mentioned in the account of the Thatched House Tavern in Henry B. Wheatley, London, Past and Present: Its History, Associations and Traditions, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1891), ii. 303, iii. 369–70. 42 Epicoene (1776), sig. A4r , lines 21–6. 43 The Town and Country Magazine; or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment, 6 (1775), 726–7. 44 The copy of the 1640 folio of Jonson’s Workes now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC (shelfmark STC 14753 Copy 7) belonged not to R. B. Sheridan the 41

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early biographer) recalled that ‘The present Charles Surface was at first Clerimont, then Florival, the Captain Harry Plausible, then Harry Pliant or Pliable, then Young Harrier, and then Frank—while his elder brother was successively Plausible, Pliable, Young Pliant, Tom, and, lastly, Joseph Surface’.45 Clerimont, via Epicœne, and Pliant, via The Alchemist, are both Jonsonian names; even Surface recalls Face in The Alchemist. But, more strongly, the dramatic architecture Act IV, scene 3, in The School for Scandal, the ‘Screen Scene’, recalls the intricately timed plotting of Jonson’s major Jacobean comedies: Lady Teazle hidden behind the screen and Sir Peter moved off-stage into the closet by the stage-managing Joseph Surface invoke Mosca shuffling suitors in Volpone, and Face distributing dupes in The Alchemist. John Hoadley’s letter to Garrick, quoted in part above, had commented on the links between Jonson’s comic mode in Epicœne and that of the Restoration theatre: ‘I have read ye . Play lately, & with Attention; and am astonish’d at the Likeness to Congreve’s Writings—not only as to Plot, but even ye Brilliancy of Wit & Conversation.’46 The School for Scandal develops this inheritance.47 The social comedy enacted in Jonson’s Epicœne was nearer to the heart of late eighteenth-century theatre and society than has been realized. Epicœne was revived for a benefit performance by John Edwin on 26 April 1784; The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser of 27 April 1784 reported that ‘the strength of one of our strongest old comedies’ and ‘the attraction’ of Edwin’s benefit, ‘contrived to draw together, as well[-]filled a house, as has been seen this season’.48 The 1784 revival was in fact the second such benefit performance. On the evening of 6 April 1782, at the Theatre Royal, York, Tate Wilkinson’s company performed Colman’s adaptation, ‘(never acted here)’, for the benefit of Mr Pollet,

dramatist, as reported by Margaret M. Smith, but to his grandson, R. B. Sheridan (Index of English Literary Manuscripts, iii: 1700–1800: Part 3 (London: Mansell, 1992), 331). 45 Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Longman, et al., 1825), 165–6 n.; see, more recently, Bruce Redford, ed., The Origins of ‘The School for Scandal’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 46 NAL MS F.48.F.38, item 43; Emrys Jones offers a brilliant account of Epicœne’s relations to Restoration Comedy in ‘The First West End Comedy’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 68 (1982), 215–58. 47 This affinity has earlier been argued by P. Fijn Van Draat, ‘Sheridan’s Rivals and Ben Jonson’s Every Man In his Humour’, Neophilologus, 18 (1933), 44–50; and John Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 86, 98. 48 Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 219; Matthew J. Kinservik, ‘Benefit Play Selection at Drury Lane, 1729–1769: The Cases of Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Clive, and Mrs. Pritchard’, Theatre Notebook, 50 (1996), 15–28, gives a valuable account of the benefit system.

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who played Truewit.49 Stephen Kemble, the younger brother of Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble, took the part of Dauphine; he had joined Wilkinson’s company in the previous summer.50 The choice of Epicœne for a benefit performance is again striking. The revival did not, for instance, situate itself among a larger run of Jonson’s comedies, as had the Drury Lane performance of 1776: Wilkinson’s York company had last performed Jonson four years earlier, when Every Man In his Humour was performed twice, and Volpone once, in the summer of 1778. But it needs to be situated within our understanding of Jonson’s place in this theatre: Jonson’s play may have been less the draw than the ‘flying leap over the | statue of king william’, the ‘lion’s leap over | ten men’s heads’, and ‘a Leap through a Picture Scene, Fourteen Feet high’ to be performed by James Chalmers at the evening’s close, but his play was still unapologetically part of that evening’s entertainment.51 In 1789, George Colman returned to Epicœne to create the afterpiece Ut Pictura Poesis; or, The Enraged Musician, which drew also on Hogarth’s print of the same name.52 If, in doing so, it participated in a much older debate about the relation of poetry and painting, this was not its primary attraction in 1789.53 Besides Dr Arnold’s music, which was the cause of its main impact, the minimal plot of Colman’s Ut Pictura Poesis grafts the noise-hating conceit of Epicœne to the thwarted love of Young Quaver for Castruccina, whose father, Castruccio, is set against the union. Having heard Young Quaver outline his predicament, the Knife Grinder replies: Ay! say you so? then I’ll secure the Fair; I know Castruccio’s humour to a hair: He’s like an Ass, all Ear; and only thence Bliss charms his soul, or pain annoys his sense. For sounds, he’s like Ben Jonson’s Old Morose; 49 For details of Wilkinson’s performances, I draw, unless otherwise noted, on Linda Fitzsimmons and Arthur W. McDonald, eds., The Yorkshire Stage, 1766–1803 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989). 50 Highfill et al., a Biographical Dictionary, viii. 394–403. 51 I quote from the collection of Tate Wilkinson’s playbills, now in York Minster Library (6 Apr. 1782, Playbills Volume 11). 52 George Colman the Elder, Ut Pictura Poesis; or, The Enraged Musician (London: T. Cadell, 1789); BL 11777.c.23 is an interleaved and marked-up promptbook of Ut Pictura Poesis, with its Prologue in manuscript. 53 Jonson himself twice translated the source of the Latin tag, Horace’s Art of Poetry; it was given renewed force in the late eighteenth century by translations of Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, L’Art de peinture (Paris: Nicholas L’Anglois, 1668), of which Walter Churchey, ‘The Art of Painting’, in Poems and Imitations of the British Poets (London: the author, 1789), if not the most famous, was at least timely.

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Theatre, Criticism, Editing Like him we’ll plague him with a trick jocose.
I’ll scour the street, and to his door bring down The various torments of this noisy town, 54 To split his ears, and all his senses drown.

As good as his word, the Knife Grinder orchestrates a final d´enouement in which Jonson is united with Hogarth in punishment of Castruccio. As the final stage direction has it: ‘the rest of the piece concludes amidst the confusion of drums playing, &c. a girl, with a rattle, little boy with a penny trumpet, old bagpiper, &c. as near as possible to Hogarth’s Print of the enraged musician.’ The connection between Jonson and Hogarth here staged had far wider currency in the period. Horace Walpole had considered Hogarth ‘rather as a writer of comedy with a pencil, than as a painter’.55 Coleridge was later struck by similarities between Jonson’s art and Hogarth’s, remarking in the margin of his copy of the 1811 Stockdale edition of Jonson’s Works that Jonson’s description of Busy in Bartholomew Fair, ‘He eats with his eyes, as well as his teeth’, would be ‘a good Motto for the Parson in Hogarth’s Election Dinner’.56 In 1816, both William Hazlitt and an anonymous reviewer for The Bath Journal offered descriptions of Jonson as a painter, the latter reviewer drawing a specific comparison with Hogarth (I return to them later). Colman’s adaptation here signals a rather more causal relationship between Jonson and Hogarth; for although Ronald Paulson, in the standard account of Hogarth’s engraving, discusses the relationship of the 1741 plate to its 1789 staging, he does not mention the relationship between the 1741 plate and its 1609 inspiration, Epicœne.57 For Hogarth’s engraving, with its cast of pewterers, chimney-sweeps, ballad-singers, knife-grinders, and tradesmen of all sorts, keeps much closer to Jonson’s play than to the source in Addison’s Spectator, no. 29, offered by Paulson. Rather than a memory of Addison’s graceful, Latinate discursive prose, Hogarth’s print translates to the page the bustling theatrical London discussed by Truewit and Clerimont in Act 1, scene 1, with its native cast of fish-wives, orange-women, chimney-sweepers, 54

Ut Pictura Poesis, 13. Quoted in Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 157. 56 Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, iii. v. 51 (1811, p. 453); S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), iii. 189. 57 Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd rev. edn. ed. Ronald Paulson (London: Print Room, 1989), 110–11 and 334–5. 55

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broom-men, costardmongers, smiths, hammermen, braziers, amourers, and pewterers’ prentices.58 If Hogarth substitutes a musician for Morose, the means of his suffering are identical. Here, the figure of ‘Ben Johnson’s Ghost’ that had looked on dispiritedly over Hogarth’s Masquerades and Operas (1723/4) and A Just View of the British Stage (1724) gives way to a more lively presence, as Epicœne is caught up not only in the 1741 engraving but in the 1789 afterpiece, extending a line of connected influence through the eighteenth century.59 As Colman’s afterpiece stages Hogarth, so too does it stage Hogarth’s earlier indebtedness to Jonson, as well as Colman’s adaptation of his own Epicœne: the literary and historical texture of The Enraged Musician is layered with the history of Jonson’s reception. The adaptation of Epicœne published at his own expense in 1798 by John Penn keeps odd company in the second volume of his two-volume Critical, Poetical, and Dramatic Works, miscellaneous composite volumes made up of his earlier, separately published poetry, prose pamphlets, and execrable tragedy, The Battle of Eddington; or, British Liberty (1796).60 The adaptation of Epicœne follows on from Penn’s imitative Art of English Poetry, as one of three dramas ‘reduced’, as their half-title describes them, ‘according to the dramatic | principles exemplified in the | battle of eddington; | in order to show their effect on works | of established reputation’. That the first of these ‘dramas’ should be Milton’s Samson Agonistes stands as fair warning of what follows, if also of Penn’s indomitable hopefulness: Samson Agonistes ‘might, in nearly this form’, he writes, ‘be acted as an interlude, without danger of being ill received’ (ii. 213). Penn’s ‘dramatic | principles’ are both neo-classical and strongly nationalistic: his largest change to Epicœne, the marking of a new scene at the entry of each new character, is both modelled on French practice and intended, at the same time, to demonstrate the English roots of such a practice. His intention in adapting Epicœne, Penn writes, is ‘that foreigners, who will understand a play better divided in a manner they are used to, may see how well contrived a comedy was produced in England, long before the theatre flourished in France’ (ii. 214). Penn’s Epicœne, then, despite its gestures towards theatrical practice—a note keyed to the song in i. i points out that ‘Here is an 58

Epicœne, i. i. 145–54; Epicœne (1776), 4. See Hogarth’s Graphic Works, ed. Paulson, 47–9 and 230 (Masquerades and Operas), and 55–6 and 241 (A Just View of the British Stage). 60 John Penn, Critical, Poetical, and Dramatic Works, 2 vols. (London: the author, [1798]), with further references given in the text; this adaptation is not mentioned by H&S, though Gifford, 1816, iii. 337, refers to it. 59

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opportunity afforded of employing a young singer of talents’ (ii. 271)—is really an appropriation of Jonson’s comedy in the continued defence of ‘British Liberty’ first mounted on the field at Edington. As his translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry is addressed ‘to the poets of Great Britain’, so Penn dwells on the political aspects of that address in his ‘Preface’: ‘With respect to France, I think I have made English patriotism appear not improperly hostile to her’ (ii. p. xxxvii). Penn co-opts Epicœne into a pattern of neo-classical, native achievement that runs from Jonson through Dryden, Congreve, Pope—and, perhaps, Penn. The two volumes of his Works extendedly enact just the same collocation of national defiance of the French with praise of the neo-classical perfection of Epicœne that had first motivated Dryden’s An Essay on Dramatic Poetry. In Penn’s account, even Jonson’s long fourth act in Epicœne becomes a martial defence of the nation. Remarking that, by contrast with French practice, the single act ‘contains as many scenes . . . as any of their longest plays’, Penn figures Jonson’s compositional practice as combat: ‘Such an example of sterling resolution in buckling-to composition, was given by our old poet!’ (ii. 216). The links with Jonson’s biography, his single combat in the Low Countries and his duel with Gabriel Spencer, are not pointed up by Penn; but their relevance appears clear: Epicœne, far from being an urban comedy, really marks Jonson’s intervention in defence of the nation and its native constitution. The distance between the two Epicœnes, George Colman’s adaptation of 1776 and Penn’s of 1798, is not merely dramatic, a matter of theatrical difference, but one of historical and political difference also. Penn’s unperformed adaptation of Epicœne seeks to remove Jonson’s play from theatrical utility and appropriate it for political, nationalistic ends.

II The popularity of The Tobacconist, Francis Gentleman’s 1776 adaptation of The Alchemist, offers a further example of this movement between the theatrical and the political in Jonson’s reception. Writing of The Coxcombs, Francis Gentleman’s 1771 adaptation of Epicœne, Percy Simpson, with a fine hauteur, complained that Gentleman had ‘treated Epicœne as he had treated The Alchemist in 1770, degrading it to farce’.61 Gentleman’s 61

H&S ix. 223.

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The Coxcombs survives only in fragments;62 but The Tobacconist must rank among the most theatrically visible signs of Jonson’s presence on the Romantic stage, and so too must be freed from the evaluative hierarchies made manifest in Simpson’s complaint for its importance to be appreciated. Gentleman wrote of his adaptation, which reduced the five acts of Jonson’s play to the two more manageable as an afterpiece, ‘that it was meant to give Mr. WESTON’s established merit in the character of Abel Drugger, more frequent, familiar, and compact opportunity of shewing itself, than the Old Play can possibly afford’.63 Thomas Weston’s success as Jonson’s hapless tobacconist was such, as James Northcote told William Hazlitt, that ‘Garrick would never attempt Abel Drugger after him’.64 The result of Gentleman’s adaptation, as he admitted in the printed text of the afterpiece, was such that ‘very little of the original is retained, but a general idea, and the part of Abel Drugger’. In the period after 1776, The Tobacconist was performed relatively infrequently on the London stage, a revival in 1784 signalling a long period without performances until it was revived again at the turn of the century;65 the piece returned to the stage again, with Edmund Kean as Drugger, in 1816, a production to which I shall return later. But away from the capital, Gentleman’s adaptation retained a tremendous popularity. On 10 April 1776, at Tate Wilkinson’s Theatre Royal in York, it formed the afterpiece to Charlotte Lennox’s Old City Manners, an adaptation of Jonson’s collaborative Eastward Ho! in which she had been encouraged by Garrick.66 However, its real period of popularity came in the period 1796–8, when a production that starred John Emery as Abel Drugger was performed a remarkable twenty times on Wilkinson’s York circuit. These performances, at York, Doncaster, Pontefract, Hull, and Leeds, partly testify to the difference in theatrical taste between the metropolitan and provincial theatres, but partly also to a vitality, and independence of taste, in the provincial theatre. The surviving promptbook 62 ‘A scene from the coxcombs. Written by Mr. Gentleman and performed at the TheatreRoyal in the Hay-market, on Monday Sept. 23.’ and the ‘prologue to the coxcombs. Spoken by Mr. Gentleman’: The Oxford Magazine (Sept. 1771), 92, 112. 63 Francis Gentleman, The Tobacconist (London: J. Bell, 1771), sig. A4v . 64 William Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), 211; Highfill et al., eds., Biographical Dictionary, xvi. 4–10, offers a useful biographical account of Weston and a selection of further anecdotes. 65 Performance details to 1800 are taken from Van Lennep et al., eds., London Stage. 66 Charlotte Lennox, Old City Manners (London: T. Becket, 1775); the manuscript presented to James Larpent, the Lord Chamberlain, is now Huntington MS Larpent 396 (Garrick’s application is dated 3 Nov. 1775).

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shows that, just as Gentleman had retained little of Jonson’s original, so Wilkinson did not retain all of Gentleman’s adaptation: by removing the part of Sir Epicure Mammon entirely from the piece, Wilkinson effected a long, twelve-page cut from the start of Act II that quickened the pace of Gentleman’s already rapid adaptation.67 The promptbook testifies also to the pragmatic connectedness of theatrical practice across this period. A note dated 1796 at the foot of sig. A4v in Wilkinson’s hand requires the ‘Characters to be dress’d | in Old English’ for the revival, as they had been twenty years earlier for Colman’s Drury Lane Epicœne. What such a production decision might entail was, however, a different matter; and a note at the foot of the facing page, again in Wilkinson’s hand, admits as much: ‘NB.—| Ask Mr . Southgate | and Mr . Leng how it was dress’d.’ Southgate and Leng had played the minor parts of Knowlife and Headlong in Wilkinson’s productions of The Tobacconist twenty years earlier in the mid-1770s, the productions for which the promptbook was initially marked up; their wives were cast in the roles of Miss Rantipole and Doll Tricksy in the 1796 revival.68 The practical force of Wilkinson’s revivals, and their shared promptbook (a parallel to the Every Man In promptbook with which I began), offers telling evidence not only for the continued life of a Jonsonian theatrical mode on the turn-of-the-century stage, but for the connectedness of that dramatic tradition with the Garrick-era theatre so often assumed to have changed radically at his retirement.69 The remarkable popularity of a different, now lost, adaptation of The Alchemist at Sheridan’s Drury Lane from March to December 1782, a period in which it was performed twelve times as an afterpiece (once to Every Man In his Humour), while it furthers our sense of Jonson’s continued stage-worthiness, has good claim to be considered not only in theatrical but also in political contexts.70 The debate in the Commons on 17 February 1783, during which consideration was given to ‘the 67 The promptbook is Beinecke Library, Yale University, Im G289 771T; it is described, but not connected with this series of performances, in Edward A. Langhans, Eighteenth Century British and Irish Promptbooks: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 83–4. 68 See playbill of 20 May 1796 in York Minster Library; and also the manuscript cast list for a performance on 15 July 1796 in Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt 100, fol. 46r , a York commonplace book of the late eighteenth century. 69 There was also a performance of Every Man In his Humour for the first time in eighteen years at Bath on 22 Feb. 1796: see The Bath Journal, 53, no. 2719 (22 Feb. 1796). 70 Noyes argues persuasively that this adaptation must differ from The Tobacconist; no text of it (apparently) survives (Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 170 n. 3).

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Preliminary Articles of Peace, Between Great Britain and France and Spain, and of the Provisional Treaty with the United States of America’, was remarkable not only for its length (the house did not divide until 7.30 on the following morning), but for Sheridan’s jibes at Pitt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Accounts record that Pitt, in his first major speech for Lord North’s administration, was ‘pointedly severe’ in his strictures on the Rockinghamite Whigs who opposed the Articles, among whom he singled out Sheridan for particular notice: No man admired more than he did the abilities of that right honorable [sic] gentleman, the elegant sallies of his thought, the gay effusions of his fancy, his dramatic turns, and his epigrammatic points; and if they were reserved for the proper stage, they would, no doubt, receive what the honorable gentleman’s abilities always did receive, the plaudits of the audience; and it would be his fortune ‘‘sui plausu gaudere theatri.’’71

Pitt’s attack keeps Sheridan’s extra-political career clearly in sight; his adaptation of Lucan’s phrase, plausuque sui gaudere theatri, pins the older man to his ownership of Drury Lane, rhetorically allying him with Pompey, who (in the dramatist Nicholas Rowe’s amplifying translation) ‘In his own Theatre rejoyc’d to sit, | Amidst the noisie Praises of the Pit’.72 No noisy praises from this Pitt; but the range of reference that animated Sheridan’s no less pointed response again makes peculiarly apt sense when placed in relation to age and to Drury Lane. Although he ironically praised ‘the propriety, the taste, the gentlemanly point’ of Pitt’s intervention, Sheridan owned that he would meet such a taunt, were it to be repeated in the future, ‘with the most sincere good humour’. Rather than seek to disavow his theatrical association, Sheridan chose to emphasize it. He continued: Nay, I will say more, flattered and encouraged by the right honorable gentleman’s panegyric on my talents, if ever I again engage in the compositions he alludes to, I may be tempted to an act of presumption, to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson’s best characters, the character of the Angry Boy in the Alchymist.73

Was The Alchemist brought back into the repertory for Dodd’s benefit on 21 March 1782 because of Pitt’s sudden political prominence? Even before 71 Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 5 vols. (London: Patrick Martin, 1816), i. 46–7. 72 Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 133, trans. Nicholas Rowe as Lucan’s Pharsalia (London: Jacob Tonson, 1718 [1719]), 11 (i. 251–2). 73 Speeches of . . . Sheridan, i. 47; the text of Sheridan’s retort is confirmed by Hansard (The Parliamentary History of England, 23 (1814), 491).

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Lord North’s resignation on 20 March 1782, Pitt was an increasingly visible and audible presence in the House of Commons. His maiden speech on 26 February 1781 marked his arrival; by 8 March 1782 his announcement that ‘he never would accept of a subordinate office’ in the manœuvrings to replace Lord North certainly struck many by its arrogance.74 The revival is certainly suggestive: Gillian Russell has argued that the impact on the Georgian theatre of the Licensing Act of 1737 was that as well as ‘ensuring that explicit political comment never reached the stage, it simultaneously generated the sensitivity which is the concomitant of censorship, ensuring that politics were seen everywhere’.75 But, in this climate, even if we should discount a directly causal relation between the political and the theatrical, it remains vital that Sheridan’s allusion in the House of Commons finds in Kastril, the angry boy, a figure for Pitt, the angry young politician. This suggests not only that Jonson’s play had a place in the political world of the late eighteenth century, as in its theatre, but also that it was sufficiently well known for Sheridan’s reference to be understood. Sheridan’s parliamentary employment of Jonson itself enjoyed something of a politicized afterlife in William Godwin’s collection of parodies, The Herald of Literature (1784).76 The seventh article in Godwin’s Herald took up the invitation extended by Sheridan’s speculative ‘if ever I again engage’ to offer a new scene from ‘The Alchymist, a Comedy, Altered from Ben Jonson, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Esq.’. In the revised scene, Godwin’s Subtle offers a Pitt-like Kastril instruction in duelling, instructions formulated via those offered earlier by Touchstone (As You Like It, v. iv) and Sheridan’s own Puff (The Critic, i. ii). These ‘last touches to the art of petulance’, as Godwin’s Subtle calls them, are both a mockery of, and qualification for, Kastril’s political ambition, a rendering of a political career and political debate as a duellist’s adversarial contest. Godwin’s Kastril, transparently a parody of Pitt, is made to imagine that ‘the accomplishments of petulance and choler would be of no use’ in

74 Quoted in John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, 3 vols. (London: Constable, 1969–96), i. 80; see also Michael Duffy, The Younger Pitt (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 4–6. 75 Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 16. 76 The Herald of Literature was published on 17 Nov. 1783, although its title-page is dated 1784: see Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed., Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1993), v. 25; all further quotations from Godwin are from this edition.

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Parliament; urged on by Subtle (‘Of no use?—Why, sir, they can be no where so properly.—’), Kastril vows advancement: Kastril Doctor, you shall be satisfied—I’ll be in parliament in a month—I’ll be prime minister—lord high treasurer of England—or, chancellor of the exchequer! Subtle Oh, by all means chancellor of the exchequer! You are somewhat young indeed—but that’s no objection.—Damn me, if the office can ever be so respectably filled as by an angry boy.

The ‘Impartial and Critical Review of New Publications’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, though it allowed that there might be ‘some archness’ in Godwin’s humour and ‘some keenness in his wit’, was unprepared to admit the point of his satire: ‘Mr. Pitt has every claim upon the candour and admiration of the publick.’ The review concluded that the manner and effect of Godwin’s anonymous attack, carried out ‘with all the wantonness of satire’, served ‘to throw down the eternal distinctions of virtue and vice, and to take away half the motives of heroical and intrepid exertion’.77 It may have done; but it did not prevent Godwin from repeating the taunt at ‘this angry boy, this impertinent Kastril’ in his character of Pitt for The Morning Chronicle (13 June 1786).78 To see Jonson’s play appropriated in such contexts, where theatre on the stage and in the House come together, is to revitalize our sense of Jonson’s importance in the period.

III A chronological listing of performances of Jonson’s plays on the stages at London, Bath, and the York circuit clearly demonstrates that for a decade from the late 1780s through until the late 1790s his plays did practically disappear from the professional repertoire. But what has not been recognized, partly at least because coverage provided by The London Stage ceases at 1800, is that his plays returned to the stage with something of a flourish in the years around the turn of the century; and that in 77

Gentleman’s Magazine, 53 (1783), 1036–7. Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, ed. Philp, i. 296. William Hazlitt later described Godwin’s ‘correct acquired taste in poetry and the drama. He relishes Donne and Ben Jonson, and recites a passage from either with an agreeable mixture of pedantry and bonhommie’: The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), vii. 97. 78

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the first decade or so of the nineteenth century they settled down into a solid, if unremarkable, pattern of regular revivals (chiefly of Every Man In his Humour).79 In these years the very unremarkedness of these Jonson revivals is precisely the point: his plays, if they were not performed with anything approaching the frequency with which they had been under Garrick, remained within the theatrical repertoire as stock plays that could be performed without the fanfare of an ostentatious revival. This pattern is broken in 1816, here as in so many other contexts a key year in the history of Jonson’s Romantic reception, by two revivals of Every Man In his Humour: one in Bath, with W. C. Macready making his d´ebut as Kitely, and the other in London, with Edmund Kean in the same role. The year 1816 sees the revival not only of Every Man In, but of David Garrick, with whom both actors found themselves compared. After 1800 the association of Jonson with a particular stamp of theatrical legitimacy became newly powerful. In 1776, Colman had written that ‘the principal duties of a Director of a Theatre’ were ‘to atone, in some measure, for the mummery which his situation obliges him to exhibit’.80 John Philip Kemble was acutely aware of the ‘situation’ described by Colman, and, again like Colman before him, he reached for Jonson to shore up his theatrical legitimacy. At the conclusion of the 1801–2 season, irritated by its owner, Sheridan, Kemble resigned from Drury Lane and began negotiations to buy into the ownership of Covent Garden; he finally purchased a one-sixth share at Covent Garden for £22,000 in April 1803.81 Under Kemble’s management, Every Man In his Humour was regularly performed at Covent Garden in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Looking back over this period in 1811, Leigh Hunt praised ‘the numerous revivals of late, which do so much credit to Mr. Kemble’: Every Man In his Humour took its place alongside Twelfth Night, Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts and Addison’s Cato.82 Hunt had in mind the little heralded but regular performances mounted each year at Covent Garden.83 Every Man In, the great comedy of urban London, itself transplanted by Jonson from the Continent to the local 79 My sources for this statement, and for the discussion of the productions that follow, are the ‘Theatrical Register’ of The Gentleman’s Magazine; Genest, Some Account; and BL Add. MSS 31974–5, John Philip Kemble’s professional memoranda, records of plays performed, and theatre receipts over the periods 1801–7 and 1807–15. 80 Epicœne (1776), sig. A3r . 81 Highfill et al., eds., Biographical Dictionary, viii. 354. 82 The Examiner (3 Mar. 1811), 140–1. 83 Between the performances of the 1801–2 and 1809–10 seasons, discussed in detail below, Every Man In was performed by the Covent Garden company on 21 Sept. 1803; 12

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as he revised from quarto to folio, stands alone in the repertory of these years, a narrower presence on the stage than during the Garrick years, when The Alchemist (as mainpiece and afterpiece) and, to a lesser extent, Volpone had also figured in the repertory. But it stands vitally in relation to the legitimacy of the patent theatres, as we shall see. Jonathan Bate’s influential account of ‘The Romantic Stage’ has seen the politics of its leading performers figured as a contrast between the Tory, establishment legitimacy of Kemble and the radical illegitimacy of Edmund Kean.84 Such a binary division has powerful force in the period; but it is important to recognize the impact of other, lesser Jonsonian actors in the first decade following the turn of the century. Between December 1800 and May 1801, when a production starring G. F. Cooke as Kitely played ten times at Covent Garden theatre, Every Man In his Humour became part of a recognizable pattern of theatrical habit, being performed at least once in each subsequent season, and more often more frequently. James Boaden, recalling Cooke’s d´ebut as Kitely, drew an important distinction not only between Cooke’s acting and Kemble’s, but between the authors, Jonson and Shakespeare, most associated with that difference in style: The rank in life of Kitely was not above the manners of Cooke. His hasty striding of the stage backwards and forwards, the circular positioning of his arms, and the see-saw of the body during his meditation, were in Kitely appropriate, but in Macbeth vulgar and insufferable. I have already dilated upon the academic and vulgar styles in acting. At the head of each, meaning the best of each by infinite degrees, I place Kemble and Cooke.85

Though Boaden’s point of comparison is local—a matter of Every Man in by contrast with Macbeth—it reaches out towards a larger contrast between the status of Jonson’s plays and those of the patrician, legitimate style of Kemble and, it is suggested, Shakespeare. And although Kemble, once he had moved to Covent Garden, was vitally important for the continued performance of Jonson’s plays, he did not as an actor perform a single Jonsonian role, so far as I have been able to ascertain. Oct. 1804; 30 Nov. 1805; 2 Jan. and 3 May 1806; 8 Jan., 28 Feb., 7 and 25 Apr. 1807; 5 Apr. and 8 Nov. 1808; 25 Apr. 1809 (the last three performances took place in the Opera House and the Haymarket, in use following the fire at Covent Garden on 20 Sept. 1808). 84 Bate, ‘The Romantic Stage’, in Bate and Jackson, eds., Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, 92–111. 85 James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), ii. 288–9.

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But it also remains the case in these years that the very success of Every Man In his Humour at Covent Garden came to stand as the reason why the play was unable to gain a wider place in the repertory at the other patent theatres. On 10 December 1802, the Drury Lane company mounted their own revival of Every Man In, with Richard Wroughton as Kitely and John Bannister jun. as Bobadil. The play was performed twice, its second and final performance following a week later on 17 December. John Genest, a shrewd observer of the swings of theatrical fortune, noted sadly in Some Account of the English Stage that ‘as this play was strongly cast at C.G., it could answer no good purpose to revive it at D.L. with inferior performers’ (vii. 568). It is a double bind: good performers bring Jonson back into public and profitable view; but they are, at the same time, a standard by which lesser productions are measured and found wanting. Tate Wilkinson’s York circuit, none the less, retained its independence: Every Man In, ‘Not Acted for several Years’ as the playbill recalled, had been revived at York on 9 May 1801 for Denman’s benefit (he performed Justice Clement); Wilkinson’s marked-up promptbook still survives.86 These examples demonstrate that Jonson’s theatrical success and theatrical presence were not always coincident in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But his presence had a permanence we have been slow to recognize. Leigh Hunt, writing in The Examiner of the newly rebuilt Covent Garden theatre, stated clearly the period’s Shakespearean bias, but allowed at the same time that there was a place for Jonson within the theatre’s architecture: The drop-scene is worthy the general classicality, and represents a temple dedicated to shakspeare, who stands in the vista in his usual attitude, while your eye approaches him through two rows of statues, consisting of the various founders of the drama in various nations, æschylus, menander, plautus, lope de vega, ben johnson, moliere, &c. They seemed to be looking over the way at each other with surprise, to find themselves on a spot so new to a set of wits.87

The gentle comedy of the surprised ‘founders of the drama’ ought not to conceal the iconic importance of their names: they lead the watching eye towards Shakespeare, perhaps, but are themselves necessary to the

86 The promptbook is now Folger Shakespeare Library, Prompt E 14; it is described, but given an earlier date, by Langhans, Eighteenth Century British and Irish Promptbooks, 83. 87 Leigh Hunt, The Examiner, 24 Sept. 1809, pp. 618–20; repr. in The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. Robert Morrison, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, et al., 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), i. 107–11.

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shaping of that perspective. Jonson was part of the fabric of the theatre, as he was also part of its repertoire. The shaping of the expensively rebuilt theatre, however, forced upon its new proprietors a rise in the price of admission; in the Old Price (OP) protests that followed, Kemble, as both manager and part owner, drew much of the audience’s hostile attention.88 But what has not been recognized is that Jonson played a more important part in these disputes than simply as a surprised, statuesque onlooker. On 1 November 1809, the evening’s on-stage theatrical entertainment saw Every Man In his Humour followed by the afterpiece Oscar and Malvina; but it was more remarkable for seeing, as The Monthly Mirror reported, ‘Mr. Clifford, the barrister’ arrested at Drury Lane ‘for wearing O.P. in his hat’.89 Here, as throughout the OP riots, it was in the pits and the boxes of the rebuilt and enlarged Covent Garden that the evening’s focus lay; and such was the case again, later in the month, when Every Man In and the afterpiece Don Juan were performed to, or rather against, the OP-protesting audience. The Monthly Mirror reflected these altered theatrical priorities when it reported of the performances on the evening of 23 November that ‘Don Juan, mocking every attempt at interruption from noise, considerably defeated the good wishes of many present’—good wishes not for its continuation, but for its disruption.90 Every Man In, though caught up in the OP hiatus, is simply part of the experience, not requiring comment from those present. Jonson’s play was not isolated from the larger shifts in theatrical constitution over this period; rather, it is alive as part of them. At the resolution of the OP protests, Kemble chose Every Man In as the mainpiece at Covent Garden for the performance on 26 December 1810, when, for the first time, the pantomime Harlequin & Asmodeus; or, Cupid on Crutches formed the afterpiece. We see here something more than Kemble’s having regarded Every Man In his Humour as a safe, or at least convenient, play with which to introduce new material into the repertory. Rather, we see Jonson vitally appropriated by Kemble as a marker of the patent theatre’s legitimacy, married up in palliation with the ‘mummery’ (to adopt Colman’s earlier term) of the evening’s pantomime. Jonson is not merely an onlooker in this theatre: his texts 88 I have benefited from the discussion in Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. 18–36. 89 The Monthly Mirror (Dec. 1809), 362; Clifford’s role is discussed more fully by Gillian Russell, ‘Playing at Revolution: The Politics of the O.P. Riots of 1809’, Theatre Notebook, 44 (1990), 16–26. 90 The Monthly Mirror (Dec. 1809), 374.

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and his status are powerfully engaged in supporting the legitimacy of the stage. The upsurge in the Covent Garden receipts for that Boxing Day bill rendered them almost three times higher than for a performance of Every Man In two months previously, an increase that can perhaps partly be associated with the season and partly with the novelty of the new pantomime.91 According to an unidentified review: Last night the Comedy of Every Man in his Humour, was represented at this Theatre; but the dramatic bonne bouche of the evening was the new Pantomime, for the performance of which all hearts were dilated, from the gods in the Upper Gallery, to the mercantile mortals in the pit.92

The relationship of Jonson’s play to its afterpiece seems, in this context, to be one simply of disconnection, a place-holder with which to occupy a part of the evening’s bill to which no one in the theatre would pay much attention. But Kemble, whatever his hopes for the new pantomime, would hardly have chosen to jeopardize its success by pairing it with a play that was unlikely to appeal to the theatre audience. So too, the choice of Every Man In to accompany the pantomime fits a pattern that is evident in the Covent Garden production records: in the previous year, 1809, Every Man In was performed twice in November and then again in December; with a single production between December 1809 and November 1810, the play was then performed twice within two months, latterly as the mainpiece to Harlequin & Asmodeus.93 The very lack of fanfare with which the play was put on suggests a level of easy acceptance and readiness, in the company and in the audience, that the play was simply part of the ‘stock’ repertoire: it speaks, that is, both of Jonson’s theatrical unremarkability and of his legitimating, authorizing function. Part of the reason for the failure of the Drury Lane production of Every Man In in December 1802 was as I have argued, the excellence of G. F. Cooke as Kitely in the contemporary Covent Garden production. In an edition of Every Man In, published as part of her twenty-five-volume collection, The British Theatre, Elizabeth Inchbald clearly located the Covent Garden production, with which the title-page of her edition associated itself, within a larger span of theatrical history: 91

BL Add. MS 31975, fols. 148v , 156v . Unidentified clipping pasted to Covent Garden playbill of 26 Dec. 1810 (Theatre Museum). 93 For dates and receipts, see BL Add. MS 31975, fols. 42v (8 Nov. 1808), 56v (3 Feb. 1809), 68v (25 Apr. 1809), 95v (1 Nov. 1809), 98v (23 Nov. 1809), 101v (13 Dec. 1809), and 114v (6 Mar. 1810). 92

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From Garrick’s death till Cooke appeared, the play was again neglected; for without peculiar excellence in the representation of Kitely, it has but little attraction. Cooke has the praise of having given it all its former power over the town, and to have fully supplied the vacant post of Garrick.94

This same vacancy served later to measure Edmund Kean in his performances as Kitely. The painter Joseph Farington recorded in his Diary for 15 May 1816 that during the remarkable season in which Kean helped to revive Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts it was only at Sir George Beaumont’s prompting that Kean had consented to add an attempt at Kitely to his revivalist repertoire. With his usual thoroughness Farington noted: rose 10 after 8.—Sir G. Beaumont called.—We talked of Kean, the Actor. He sd. He (Sir George) had urged him to take up the Character of Kitely in ‘Every Man in His Humour’, and had endeavoured to represent to Him how Garrick performed several passages of it.95

It is a revealing moment: some forty years after Garrick’s final performance as Kitely, his is still the standard by which Kean is instructed and against which he is judged. At the same time, Beaumont’s instruction offers Kean not so much hints as to the performance of Kitely, but towards the performance of Garrick-as-Kitely. Beaumont was himself an amateur actor, and had participated in the performance of Every Man In mounted by Oldfield Bowles at North Aston during the Christmas celebrations in December 1774.96 The theatrical memories against which he measured Kean’s performance were therefore lengthy. He found Kean’s performance duly unimpressive; Farington recorded on Thursday 6 June 1816: Sir G. Beaumont called & sat with me some time. He spoke of Kean, the Actor, who he saw last night in the Character of Kitely for the first time of his performing it. Sir George could not very much approve His performance & repeated several passages in the manner in which Garrick expressed them thereby shewing how much Kean was deficient [sic] in giving the nice touches of character in which Garrick excelled.97 94 Every Man In his Humour . . . With Remarks by Mrs Inchbald (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, [1806]); the paper in the Leeds University Library copy is watermarked 1806. 95 The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre, and Kathryn Cave, 17 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978–98), xiv. 4833. 96 Sybil Rosenfield, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978), 141. 97 Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Garlick et al., xiv. 4848.

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Beaumont’s dissatisfaction with Kean’s performance speaks partly to an old man’s nostalgia, but more broadly to an impasse following Garrick’s retirement: why revive a play if it has already been performed better elsewhere or by another? For the success of Garrick as Kitely and Drugger was such that the characters became identified with him as much as with Jonson: just as the plays’ literary reputation suffered by association with their author, so too did successive revivals by comparison with the memory of Garrick. The afterlife of Jonson’s plays in this period is inextricably caught up with Garrick’s afterlife. In a review of Kean’s performance in The Examiner (9 June 1816), William Hazlitt conceded that Jonson’s play ‘acts much better than it reads’: Jonson ‘painted not so much human nature as temporary manners . . . peculiarities of phrase, modes of dress, gesture, &c. which becoming obsolete, and being in themselves altogether arbitrary and fantastical, have become unintelligible and uninteresting’. Jonson’s geographical and temporal specificity becomes, in this formulation, the means by which his texts are bound into the past. The high point of the performance, as Hazlitt judged it, was Kitely’s ‘reconciliation-scene with his wife’. The scene, he wrote, had great spirit, where he tells her, to shew his confidence, that ‘she may sing, may go to balls, may dance,’ and the interruption of this sudden tide of concession with the restriction—‘though I had rather you did not do all this’—was a master-stroke. It was perhaps the first time a parenthesis was ever spoken on the stage as it ought to be. Mr. Kean certainly often repeats this artifice of abrupt transition in the tones in which he expresses different passions, and still it always pleases,—we suppose, because it is natural.

A natural master-stroke of text and actor it may have been; but it wasn’t, in either case, Jonson’s. Hazlitt is misremembering the scene added by Garrick to the close of Act IV of Jonson’s play in which Kitely boasts that his confidence in his wife is such that, were she ‘inclin’d | To masks, to sports, and balls’ he would happily let her go—‘not but | I had rather thou should’st prefer thy home’.98 It is a curious moment: although Garrick does not moderate Kean’s performance, as he had for Beaumont and Farington, here his text moderates Jonson’s, providing a standard of achievement against which later performances are measured. 98 Every Man In his Humour (1776), 79–80; the text given in The Plays of David Garrick, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, 7 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980–2), iv. iii. 126–33, transposes ‘But not’ in l. 132 in error.

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Kean’s Kitely, despite the impression it made on Hazlitt, was not central to the success of his 1816 season at Drury Lane: it was, after all, his Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts for which the theatre board presented him with the cup, rather than for his Kitely or his Drugger. To follow the preparations and the aftermath of the first performance of the revived Every Man In through the Drury Lane playbills is to see this very clearly. First advertised in the playbill of 3 June 1816, ‘(not acted these 14 years)’, Every Man In was performed first on 5 June. The following day’s playbill (6 June) carried this paragraph of text: Ben. Jonson’s Comedy of every man in his humour | was last Night received with unexampled Applause throughout; but, | on Account of the very great and increased Demand for Places for | the Tragedy of bertram, Mr. kean can only perform the Part | of kitely on Thursday next, and on Monday the 17th Inst.

The claim of ‘unexampled Applause’ was repeated on the bills of 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12 June in preparation for Kean’s second performance as Kitely on 13 June. Henry Crabb Robinson watched this second performance: ‘I have not been often more disappointed,’ he wrote in his Diary, a disappointment derived not only from Kean’s performance but from Jonson’s play. Kitely, he thought, gave ‘Kean little scope for his talents’, and Jonson’s plot he found simply baffling: ‘an unintelligible intrigue by a knavish servant who is supposed to deceive all parties, but why or how I could not comprehend’.99 Crabb Robinson’s disappointment seems to have been more widely felt: the playbill printed on Friday 14 June advertised not the third performance of Every Man In, but rather another performance by Kean as Massinger’s Sir Giles Overreach. The playbills tell of an effort on the part of the Drury Lane publicists to build excitement which abruptly failed: Every Man In was not performed again at Drury Lane in the 1816 season. But it is perhaps not to Kean in London but to the young William Macready in Bath that we ought to look for the more important d´ebut as Kitely in the 1816 season, for here, correcting our metropolitan bias, the theatre away from the capital can provide a stronger link forwards through the century. On the evening of Saturday 10 February 1816, Macready had made his d´ebut as Kitely at the Theatre Royal, Bath.100 99 The London Theatre, 1811–1866: Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Eluned Brown, (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966), 72. 100 For details of performances in this paragraph I draw, unless otherwise noted, on Arnold Hare et al., eds., Theatre Royal Bath: A Calendar of Performances at the Orchard Street Theatre, 1750–1805 (Bath: Kingsmead Press, 1977).

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In his Reminiscences, Macready gave a largely negative account both of Jonson’s play and his own d´ebut performance in it: for the part of Kitely, one of the most difficult out of Shakespeare on the stage, and which in after years I made one of my ablest personations, sufficient time was not allowed, nor had I then experience for the mastery of so eccentric a character.101

Contemporary praise for his performance was far less muted: his Kitely drew a glowing and hitherto unnoticed review in The Bath Journal. Reminiscing, Macready complained that there could ‘scarcely be found a company of players to adequately fill the various parts’ in Every Man In; but the reviewer for The Bath Journal was not so easily convinced. Mr Woulds, who had taken the part of Stephen, the reviewer found ‘irresistibly comical’: his ‘regrets . . . on looking at his bent and crooked ‘‘poledo [sic] blade,’’ . . . and the attendant disappointment and chagrin presented a picture well worthy the pencil of Hogarth. It was the ne plus ultra of ridiculous expression; and had Mr. Woulds never appeared in any other character, he would have established himself as one of the first low comedians of the day.’ But the success of the revival was attributed as much to the construction of the play, and its starring d´ebutant: Nearly all the effect of this play arises from the amusing bustle continually pervading it, and from the uncommon drollery of several of its characters. The plot is extremely meagre, and the self-created tortures of Kitely excite little or no commiseration. But there is such an infinite fund of wit and humour—such a perpetual flow of incidents—and so many highly ludicrous situations, that had Nestor been there, he must have laughed; for our own parts, so completely were we subjected to the sway of Momus, that our sides fairly ached under the discipline he imposed on us. The representation was almost perfect throughout. Mr. mc cready, in Kitely, displayed some very beautiful and natural acting.102

The reviewer is willing to take Jonson’s play on its own terms, to praise it for the elements of its construction as they stand rather than by contrast with other, Shakespearean models; it allows, too, that ‘very beautiful and natural acting’ can find a place in Jonson’s play. Hazlitt’s key term of praise for Kean, ‘natural’, is here applied also to Macready. Macready performed Kitely again in Bristol on 7 March 1816; in this period Jonson was gaining currency. When Edmund Kean acted at Bath during the fashionable Race Week later in the same year, he chose to 101 102

Macready’s Reminiscences, ed. Pollock, 79–80. Bath Journal (12 Feb. 1816).

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perform Abel Drugger in a revival of Gentleman’s The Tobacconist. An earlier performance of the part by Kean in London gave rise to an exchange between him and Garrick’s widow, Eva, that, even if apocryphal, again emphasizes the extent to which, even forty years after his retirement, Garrick’s shadow still loomed over the Romantic stage: ‘ ‘‘Dear Sir,’’ she wrote, ‘‘You cannot act Abel Drugger.—Yours, M. Garrick.’’ ‘‘Madam,’’ came the answer, ‘‘I know it.—Yours E. Kean.’’ ’103 That he still chose to perform the part at Bath in July, and again in December—when his performance was witnessed by Frances Burney (Madame d’Arblay) and her Kean-worshipping son, Alex—suggests that he was conscious of exercising (and exorcising) a post-Garrick inheritance.104 Barry Cornwall hit precisely on the tensed relations of Kean’s Jonsonian parts to Garrick’s before him, when recording a gift made to the actor by Sir George Beaumont—a gift that was perhaps not open-handed in its generosity: ‘Sir George Beaumont, besides the immortal Spanish cloak, gave him a picture of Garrick in Abel Drugger. (Was this a delicate satire of the excellent Baronet?)’.105 After 1816 there was a falling-off in productions even of Every Man In his Humour: it is as if Kean, rather than reinvigorating Jonson, served somehow to take the continued life out of his plays. On 13 and 20 May 1825, Every Man In was revived at Covent Garden with Young as Kitely; an edition of the play, with notes and descriptions of the theatrical performance by George Daniel, was published soon after.106 Later, as we saw at the start of this chapter, the Theatre Museum promptbook of Every Man In contains a record of an 1828 performance marked ‘not done’. In 1832, Macready returned to the role, as part of a season at Drury Lane in which he and Kean alternated lead roles; Macready recorded in his Diary entry of 10 December 1832 that he had ‘Acted well when Kean did not interfere with me’.107 The 1832 Drury Lane revival was (inaccurately) billed by the theatre as ‘(First Time these Fifteen Years)’. That the claim could be made in these terms suggests that the persistence of Jonson’s theatrical currency had been altered in and by the season 103 I quote from Ian McIntyre, Garrick (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1999), 620; compare Barry Cornwall [Brian Waller Proctor], The Life of Edmund Kean, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1835), 130–4. 104 The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), ed. Warren Derry, 10 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–85), ix. 444. 105 Cornwall, Life of Edmund Kean, 134. 106 Every Man In his Humour . . . With Remarks, Biographical and Critical, by D—G (London: John Cumberland, [1825]). 107 Macready’s Reminiscences, ed. Pollock, 263.

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in which Kean and Macready both made their d´ebut as Kitely. The factors behind this alteration, so far as they are now fully recoverable, tell of institutional change as well as of changed theatrical taste; but they emphasize the extent to which Jonson continued to form part of a live theatrical repertoire for many years after existing accounts retire him to the closet and the bookshelf.

IV Walter Scott’s ‘Essay on the Drama’, first published in 1819 as a Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, offered an influential account of the apparent antipathy of the Romantic period to the stage. In terms that have clear links with the dramatic nationalism of Penn two decades earlier, Scott set himself to enquire after the ‘unfortunate counterbalance, which confessedly depresses the national Drama in despite of the advantages’, of tradition and locality, discussed earlier in his essay. Scott’s solution is at once political, dramatic, and social: in all three aspects it is Jonsonian. Deprecating ‘1st, the mode of representation; 2dly, the theatrical authors and performers; and 3dly, the quality and composition of the audience’, Scott argues that the sheer size of the rebuilt Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres rendered them hostile to what he termed the ‘legitimate purposes of the Drama’. But more than this, the mode of theatrical representation that alone could prosper in such spaces required that the visual predominate over the aural: Show and machinery have therefore usurped the place of tragic poetry; and the author is compelled to address himself to the eyes, not to the understanding or feelings of the spectators. This is of itself a gross error. Everything beyond correct costume and theatrical decorum is foreign to the legitimate purposes of the Drama, as tending to divide the attention of the audience; and the rivalry of the scene-painter and the carpenter cannot be very flattering to any author or actor of genius. Besides, all attempts at decoration, beyond what the decorum of the piece requires, must end in paltry puppet-show exhibition. The talents of the scene-painter and machinist cannot, owing to the very nature of the stage, make battles, sieges, &c., anything but objects of ridicule.108

Two centuries earlier, in words that Scott’s account deliberately and allusively recalls, Jonson had lambasted Inigo Jones in his ‘Expostulation’: 108 The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, 28 vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1834–6), vi. 389–90.

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Oh, to make Boardes to speake! There is a taske Painting & Carpentry are ye Soule of Masque. Pack wt h your pedling Poetry to the Stage, This is ye money-gett, Mechanick Age! [. . .] What would he doe now, gi’ing his minde yt waye In presentacion of some puppet play!109

Scott makes of Jonson’s intensely personal rebuke to Jones a larger, more all-encompassing address, arraigning not just simply one collaborator but a whole theatrical system from base to gaudy superstructure. The specific object of Jonson’s attack becomes, for Scott, a broader statement of prevalent antitheatricality in the face of which ‘legitimate’ drama cannot survive; the ‘understanding’, to which Jonson so often addressed himself, was, by Scott’s account, absent. In 1832, John Genest printed Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, which tells a subtler story than the simple though Jonsonian repudiation enacted in Scott’s essay. If, in 1776, Genest had seen Epicœne ‘cooly [sic] received’ as precisely an instance in which merit and success signally failed to coalesce,110 his Account provides what is still, regrettably, our only substantial printed gathering of primary material on which a revisionist account such as this can be founded. Rather than falling from the repertory, Jonson’s plays remained solidly within it, as the forms in which his texts remained available for performance changed across those years. John Genest’s copy of the 1776 Colman Epicœne survives, as part of his large play collection now housed in the Beinecke Library, Yale University.111 Just as the Every Man In promptbook in the Theatre Museum with which I began offered an example of a continuity of interest reaching forward through the period from 1776 to 1832, from print to performance, so does Genest’s copy of Epicœne offer a complementary, counter-example of a continuity of interest and engagement that is more retrospective in nature. Genest’s annotations to his Epicœne are not, like those many-layered annotations to the Theatre Museum Every Man In, intended to prompt performance; rather, more antiquarian in nature, they offer records of performance and reflections on it. In the front endpapers of the composite volume 109

UV 34, ll. 49–52, 75–6; H&S viii. 404–5. Genest, Some Account, ix. 567. 111 Its call number is Beinecke Library, Yale University, Plays 735; Genest’s copies of the 1640 and 1640/1 folio Works are now respectively Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, STC 14753 Copy 1 and STC 14754 Copy 1; bound by Bayntun of Bath, both are inscribed ‘John Genest Augst . 1st . 1784’. 110

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into which his Epicœne is bound, Genest lists performances of the plays it contains, among them the 1784 Covent Garden revival of Colman’s adaptation; its rear endpapers are used by him to record reading. A list written in pencil on the rear pastedown records that in the period between its printing and the publication of Some Account, Genest read Colman’s adaptation twice: ‘Silent Woman read Ap 1803- |[. . .]|Silent = July 1812’. Records of those two readings are present in the margins of Genest’s copy, where, struck by a peculiarity of Jonson’s phrasing (such as the underlined ‘a noise of fiddles’ on page 39) or an echo of a classical writer in his text (such as the ‘imitated from Juvenal’ at the foot of page 13), Genest points up the moments in Jonson’s text that caught his attention. At the foot of the page below Colman’s ‘Prologue’, Genest has asked a central question: ‘what would Jonson have said?!’ (sig. A4r ). There could hardly be a more striking testimony to Jonson’s personal vitality as well as that of his plays.

3

Critical Jonson An interested theatre-goer in 1779, looking to purchase a handily sized, single-volume critical guide to the stage, might have picked up the newly published, anonymously compiled Playhouse Pocket-Companion; or, Theatrical Vade-Mecum. Had that purchaser been interested in Ben Jonson, what, besides its waywardly chronological listing of his plays, did the Pocket-Companion say of him in its briskly introductory thirty-page ‘History of the English Stage’? First, that he wrote during a period in which the stage flourished; second, that such a flourishing of the drama on public and private stages ‘excited the industry of all the wits of the times’. Who were those wits? Besides Shakespeare, that ‘child of fancy,’ and Johnson, ‘instructed from the school, To please in method, and invent by rule,’ there arose, during this period, a number of other dramatic writers, whose works want only to be produced on [sic] the theatre, or ushered into the closet, to be admired as they deserve. Johnson may be stiled the father of English dramatic poetry and the stage, for before him no author had thought of writing upon the model of the ancients; the tragedies of those times being merely historical dialogues, and in comedy the writers exactly followed the thread of any novel. In his Silent Woman, Johnson has given a perfect exemplar of comedy.1

The sources of this account are evident, and unembarrassedly employed; and so do they speak eloquently of a consensus that was current in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and which this manner of Companion sought to present. The description of Shakespeare, the ‘child of fancy’, reaches, as had Milton in ‘L’Allegro’, for Love’s Labour’s Lost, i. i. 168, but without his embellishing alteration: ‘sweetest Shakespeare fancy’s child’.2 Via its truncated quotation from Samuel Johnson’s 1747 1 Anon., Playhouse Pocket-Companion; or, Theatrical Vade-Mecum (London: Richardson and Urquhart, 1779), n.p. 2 John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1997).

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‘Prologue Spoken at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane’,3 the compact paragraph moves steadily towards its conclusion, a reiteration and rephrasing of that arrived at by Dryden’s Neander in his Examen of that ‘pattern of a perfect Play’, The Silent Woman.4 The Companion’s earlier rotation of Neander’s comment on Shakespeare—‘Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing’—is silently effected: two centuries of comment are seamlessly elided to form and inform an ongoing and still valid community. By reaching so far back for its opinions, the Companion offers, and offers itself within, an undisrupted continuity of agreed available responses to Jonson. The following years saw the slow unsettling of this easy consensus. This chapter explores the ways in which anthologies, biographies, and critical accounts of Jonson and his work, together with developing interests in literary history, moved on from and altered the position accepted and articulated in the Playhouse Pocket-Companion. The texts I will discuss each, in its own way, offer partial accounts of Jonson’s life and writing; but in their partiality—a matter here not only of selectivity but of preference—they speak of a recoverable set of tastes and judgements with which we can see Jonson interacting and by which he and understandings of him are altered. Jonson anthologized, is not, in the Romantic period, only or predominantly even a writer of delicate lyrics, as he was in the Victorian period: he was offered to readers as a dramatist and a prosewriter, as well as a poet of breadth and variety.5 Biographical accounts of Jonson, if they tend largely to emphasize a malignity of character (directed most often at the blameless Shakespeare) in the period before 1808, radically shift direction in the following years: Jonson’s character, and the relation of his art to his life, are both charged in the period, not only attended to but debated. Critical accounts of Jonson investigate, for the first time, his place in a wide spectrum of early modern literary and political culture, and explore the relation of his writings to the classics; in

3 Samuel Johnson, Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam, jun. and George Milne, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), vi. 87–90, ll. 9–17. R. W. Chapman notes the wide circulation achieved by the ‘Prologue’ through its inclusion in Dodsley’s Collection (1748): ‘Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands’, Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, 3 (1931–3), 269–316. 4 John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesie, An Essay (1667), quoted from D. H. Craig, ed., Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge, 1990), 251. 5 On Victorian and more recent anthologizing, see Ian Donaldson, ‘Jonson’s Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 6 (1973), 139–52.

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the earlier part of this period particularly, those explorations are informed by a familiarity with Jonson’s plays on the stage. This chapter therefore presents a period of neglected Jonsonian scholarship, partly from a conviction that some of that work is deserving of greater respect than it is customarily paid, and partly from a stronger contention that without an understanding of such critical accounts we narrow our conception of the modes in which the Romantic age responded to Jonson. A damaging presupposition of recent scholarship has been that Jonson’s reception in the period is composed of a series of more or less separate events: as I seek to demonstrate here, Jonson was in fact disputed and disputable territory, a writer on the one hand, and a body of texts on the other, that connect a wide range of various responses. So too, I wish to argue that an interest in Jonson reflected a broader set of political and literary tastes: this chapter suggests that critical responses to Jonson are usefully understood as in some measure social responses also. But Jonson’s place in the two foundational literary histories that inaugurate this period, those of Samuel Johnson and Thomas Warton, is more problematic; and it is with Johnson’s Lives and Warton’s History that I begin.

I Published in the same year as the Pocket-Companion, Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life of Cowley’—the first of the ‘little Lives, and little Prefaces’ to be completed6 —discussed Ben Jonson only incidentally: but his inclusion among those there called ‘a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets’7 is, as has been recently suggested, an under-remarked facet of the ‘Life’.8 Cowley owes his place in the collection as the inaugurating English poet to commercial, rather than to literary or historical, concerns; but Johnson’s account none the less notes the continuities from which Cowley benefited, and those from which he departed. Ben Jonson figures in this account of Cowley’s poetic precursors chiefly as a writer remarkable for the ‘ruggedness’ of his versification, a characteristic 6 William McCarthy, ‘The Composition of Johnson’s Lives: A Calendar’, Philological Quarterly, 60 (1981), 53–67. 7 Samuel Johnson, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, 10 vols. (London: C. Bathurst et al., 1779–81), i. 39; idem, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), i. 19. 8 Ian Donaldson, ‘Perishing and Surviving: the Poetry of Donne and Jonson’, Essays in Criticism, 51 (2001), 68–85.

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in which (by Johnson’s account) he resembled his contemporary Donne ‘more . . . than in the cast of his sentiments’; the relative absence of ‘ruggedness’ is later made a measure of the weakness of the two poets’ influence on Dryden, and one means by which the latter poet’s individuality is established.9 Jonson’s impact on Cowley, too, is judged slight, despite the poet’s own acknowledgement of ‘his obligation to the learning and industry of Jonson’.10 As a translator, Jonson’s example is simply deleterious: not only inelegant, he also struggled, Johnson reckoned, under the misapprehension that it was ‘necessary to copy Horace almost word by word’.11 In Thomas Warton’s broadly contemporary History of English Poetry —its first three volumes were published in 1774, 1778, and 1781 (a fragmentary fourth was printing but never completed at the end of the decade)—Jonson is present chiefly as a judge and sometime rival of his contemporaries Marlowe and Chapman. Jonson is reported to have ‘esteemed’ Marlowe’s poetry, though (with characteristic reserve) finding it ‘fitter for admiration than parallel’. More contradictory energies are released in the treatment of Chapman: Warton suggests that Jonson, his rivalrous nature momentarily quelled when ‘delivered of Shakespeare’, ‘began unexpectedly to be disturbed at the rising reputation of a new theatric rival’, at whom his hostility was subsequently directed.12 This biographically inflected account of Jonson, as we shall see, has many descendants in the period, even if their emphases, after 1808, are not the same. Only Warton’s declining interest—the project had been initiated while he was an undergraduate13 —and the accidents of the printinghouse deprived posterity of a detailed treatment of Jonson’s Epigrams. The Oxford bookseller Daniel Price reported that two further sheets of the History’s fourth volume had been composed but were unprinted at the time of Warton’s death in 1790, and, as David Fairer has argued, these probably contained the full discussion of Epigrams alongside Donne’s 9

Johnson, Prefaces, i. 49 and iii. 203; idem, Lives, i. 22 and 426. Johnson, Prefaces, i. 148; idem, Lives, i. 58. This section was revised for The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works, 4 vols. (London: C. Bathurst et al., 1781) to include Hurd’s remark that at this period ‘Jonson and Donne . . . were then in the highest esteem’ (Lives, i. 58). 11 Johnson, Prefaces, iii. 91 and 193; idem, Lives, i. 373 and 421. 12 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 3 vols. (London: J. Dodsley et al., 1774–81), iii. 435–46 and n., 447–8. 13 David Fairer, ‘The Origins of Warton’s History of English Poetry’, Review of English Studies, ns 32 (1981), 37–63. Warton had listed ‘B. Johnson Fol.’ among the books he owned in 1752. 10

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Satires towards which the work had been building.14 As it stands, the incomplete fourth volume ends (frustratingly) in mid-sentence, with a quotation from Dekker’s Satiromastix in which ‘Jonson’ threatens epigrams upon Tucca: by a quirk which is as curious as it is regrettable, Jonson’s is the last of the many good and great names led forth by Warton. The comments surveyed in the previous two paragraphs are no more than promissory in accounts of English poetic history that direct most of their energies and attention elsewhere. But, however slight (and slighting), Johnson’s glancing judgements were massively repeated: following his revision of the 1779–81 Prefaces into the four-volume Lives of 1781 and 1783, Johnson’s work saw ten London editions alone before 1816.15 Warton, though less frequently reprinted, carried similar weight. Ben Jonson is ill-served by both Johnson and Warton: commercial considerations on the one hand, scholarly and mortal ones on the other, leave Jonson stranded between the two great shaping accounts of late eighteenthcentury literary history, never quite, through no fault of his own, gaining access to the discussion. Works that might have contributed, through the penetration of their attention and the influence of their endorsement, to a revival of critical interest in Jonson appear rather to confirm (however unwittingly) his exclusion, not merely from discussion but more lastingly from appreciation. To be reported but undiscussed, to be noted as a model only for things ill done and done to others’ harm, and to remain stubbornly uninvestigated either by historian or antiquary: this is a yet crueller version of what Eliot would later characterize as ‘the most perfect conspiracy of approval’.16 But Jonson did figure, as he had done throughout the eighteenth century, in theatrical history. Isaac Reed’s Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse, published in 1782, was a revised, expanded and updated version of The Companion to the Play-House, compiled by David Erskine Baker in 1764.17 Reed’s Biographia offered a series of accounts of stage professionals (dramatists, actors, proprietors, and

14 Warton, The History of English Poetry, ed. David Fairer, 4 vols. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998), i. 62 n., iv. 89–90. 15 J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 16 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ben Jonson’, in Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 147–60, at 147. 17 David Erskine Baker, ed., The Companion to the Play-House, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket et al., 1764); Isaac Reed, ed., Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse (Dublin: W. and H. Whitestone et al., 1782).

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others) in one volume, and what is in effect a bibliography of printed drama, accompanied by short critical estimations, in a second. In revising Baker’s earlier work, Reed expanded his biography of Jonson, but was content to leave the plays untouched critically. But here, too, we see the continued force of Samuel Johnson’s 1747 Drury Lane ‘Prologue’. Reed is discussing Volpone: This comedy is joined by the critics with the Alchymist and Silent Woman, as the Chef d’Oeuvres of this celebrated poet: and, indeed, it is scarcely possible to conceive a piece more highly finished, both in point of language and character, than this comedy. The plot is perfectly original, and the circumstance of Volpone’s taking advantage of the viciousness and depravity of the human mind in others, yet being himself made a dupe to the subtilty of his creature Mosca, is admirably conceived, as inimitably executed. Yet, with all these perfections, this piece does and ever will share the same fate with the other dramatic works of its author, viz. that whatever delight and rapture they might give to the true critic in his closet, from the correctness exerted and erudition displayed in them; yet, there still runs through them all an unempassioned coldness in the language, a laboured stiffness in the conduct, and a deficiency of incident and interest in the catastrophe, and robs the auditor in the representation of those pleasing, those unaccountable sensations he constantly receives from the flashes of nature, passion, and imagination, with which he is frequently struck, not only in the writings of Shakspeare, but even in those of authors, whose fame, either for genius or accuracy, is by no means to be ranked with that of the bard under our present consideration. To write to the judgment is one thing, to the feelings of the heart, another.18

By leaving Baker’s near twenty-year-old judgement untouched, Reed’s Biographia offers a reversal of the continuities that the Pocket-Companion had reported: though Jonson and Shakespeare were there paired, here they are held apart, the deficiencies of the one measured by the excellencies of the other in precisely the terms Johnson had employed at Drury Lane: Then johnson came, instructed from the school, To please in method, and invent by rule; His studious patience, and laborious art, By regular approach essay’d the heart; Cold approbation gave the ling’ring bays, For those who durst not censure, scarce cou’d praise.19

18 Baker, ed., Companion, i. sigs. Z6v –2A1r ; Reed, ed., Biographia Dramatica, ii. 396, whose text I print. 19 Johnson, Poems, ll. 9–14.

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Reed was himself an inveterate theatre-goer, as is attested by the attendance recorded in his Diaries,20 and in the unpublished Notitia Dramatica, which (as he wrote on the title-page, dated 6 August 1784) contain ‘the most material facts relating to the Theatres for the last fifty years & will be very useful to any person[–S] who may wish to compile a History of the Stage’.21 Jonson is not at issue in Reed’s account: the stability of the Biographia’s account of him speaks not only of consensus but of complacency. Such cold approbation as Reed offers would change, however. If, in Reed’s case, his theatrical experience did not shape his critical account, Jonson’s dramatic heritage did bear on critical estimation during the period—if still not always to Jonson’s benefit. Thomas Davies’s three volumes of Dramatic Miscellanies (1783–4) review Jonson’s dramatic output from Every Man In to The Alchemist, the latter play, by Davies’s account, the effective closing of a career, his ‘last comedy of merit, for afterwards he produced nothing very estimable’.22 But besides a wealth of information regarding eighteenth-century performances and adaptations of Jonson in these chapters, Davies’s account is remarkable for the contexts in which his passing references situate Jonson. A discussion of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII gives rise to the then current opinion that the play’s prologue was Jonson’s, and the charge, as Davies writes, that he ‘in all probability, maliciously stole an opportunity to throw in his envious and spiteful invective before the representation of his rival’s play’.23 A similar colouring taints Davies’s admiration of 1 and 2 Henry IV: Methinks I see and hear the tumultuous joy and thundering applause which the unparalleled character of Falstaff must have afforded at his first representation! A character, so superior to the conception of the brightest fancy, must have struck them with astonishment! To have seen Ben Jonson, with an assumed countenance of gaiety, and with envy in his heart, join the groupe of laughers

20 Isaac Reed Diaries, 1762–1804, ed. Claude E. Jones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946). 21 The Notitia are now BL Add. MSS 25390–2; the quotation is from Add. MS 25391, fol. 2r . In the years 1780–95, Reed notes only the revivals of Colman’s adaptation of Volpone at the Haymarket Theatre on 12 Sept. 1783, and Epicœne on 26 Mar. 1784 ‘at Covt . Gardn . for Mr . Edwin’s bent :’ (BL Add. MS 25390, fols. 318r and 324r ). 22 Quotations are from Davies’s revised edition: Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols. (London: [the author], 1785), ii. 107. 23 Ibid. i. 340. The suggestion that the prologue was ‘supplied by the friendship or officiousness of Jonson’ was first made by Samuel Johnson in his 1765 Shakespeare (v. 192): Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), viii. 657–8.

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and applauders, must have added to the pleasure of our author’s real friends and admirers.24

In the eighteenth-century, Davies’s imagined ‘groupe’ might have carried with it (as the OED notes, sb.2) ‘a notion of confused aggregation’: had it done so, however, the comparison it makes with Shakespeare would have seemed eminently ordered and expected to its earliest readers. Davies’s contrasting portraits of Shakespeare and Jonson form part of a larger series of critical oppositions operating throughout the eighteenth century between, on the one hand, the magnanimity shared by Shakespeare and his representative dramatic creation, Falstaff, and, on the other, the hypocritical countenance and depreciated achievements of Jonson.25 Jonson’s historically bounded texts also drew Davies’s attention: ‘Of all our old playwrights, Jonson was most apt to allude to local customs and temporary follies.’26 The passing of such ‘stage learning . . . traditionally hoarded up’ as had kept Jonson alive on the stage, Davies writes, stands in contrast to the apparent modernity of his plays: he claimed, with Every Man Out of his Humour in mind, to see ‘every day a Sogliardo and Fungoso, differently modified, in our metropolis at this instant’.27 Davies’s work demonstrates also the critical vitality of Jonson: it provoked the hostility of The Monthly Review, which suggested that he had treated Jonson ‘with too little respect and too much severity’. The anonymous reviewer was no uncomplicated admirer of Jonson, however; the tragedies were said ‘deservedly’ to have ‘fallen into oblivion’.28 So far, so humdrum; but the review clearly riled Davies, and the 1785 edition of the Miscellanies contains a furious rebuttal, restating Davies’s opinions regarding ‘surly Ben’.29 It is important here to realize the extent to which Jonson, rather than being critically ignored, could in fact be the site of disagreement. Partly this is a matter of Davies and his reviewer severally needing an agreed account of Jonson by which to gauge Shakespeare; but it equally indicates that the understanding of Jonson was becoming newly open to debate. 24

Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, i. 277–8. Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 121–39. 26 Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, ii. 64. 27 Ibid. ii. 94–5, 74. 28 The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal, 70 (1784), 456–60. 29 Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, iii. 527–9. 25

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The relationships between the Jonsonian sections of Richard Cumberland’s Observer (1785–90) and the Dramatic Miscellanies are unusually close. Consider, for instance, the following passage from Davies, in which he compares Every Man In and The Old Bachelor: Bobadil is an original. The coward, assuming the dignity of calm courage, was, I believe, new to our stage; at least, I can remember nothing like him. From Bobadil, Congreve formed his Noll Bluff; a part most admirably acted by Ben Jonson the comedian.30

against this, from Cumberland’s Observer: Pistol’s dialogue is a tissue of old tags of bombast, like the middle comedy of the Greeks, which dealt in parody. I abate of my astonishment at the invention and originality of the poet, but it does not lessen my respect for his ingenuity. Shakespear founded his bully in parody, Jonson copied his from nature, and palm seems due to Bobadil upon a comparison with Pistol; Congreve copied a very happy likeness from Jonson, and by the fairest and most laudable imitation produced his Noll Bluff, one of the pleasantest humourists on the comic stage.31

Cumberland’s interest in dramatic lineage is coincident with his supple understanding of how imitation can variously shade into parody, copying, and likeness; but in play is also the relationship of his observation to Davies’s earlier treatment: the sense that both passages have to do with sounding out arguments for precedence and originality reflects back upon their own practices, memories, and claims. Elsewhere, when Cumberland owns his surprise at finding a source in Philostratus for Jonson’s ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’—‘our learned poet Ben Jonson had been poaching in an obscure collection of love-letters’, he writes—his discussion departs from Joseph Ritson’s suggestion and qualification in 1783 that in the same poem ‘Anacreon, had Anacreon written in English, need not have been ashamed’.32 The importance of such moments of 30 Ibid. ii. 54; on the actor Benjamin Johnson (1665–1742) see Philip H. Highfill, jun., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1600–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), viii. 171–5. 31 Richard Cumberland, The Observer: Being a Collection of Moral, Literary and Familiar Essays, 5 vols. (London: C. Dilly, 1785–90); my text is taken from the 4th edn. (1791). 32 Ibid. iv. 136; [Joseph Ritson], A Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1783), i. p. lix. J. F. M. Dovaston seems indebted to Cumberland in The Monthly Review, 34 (1815), 123–4, when he corrects Ritson regarding Jonson’s use of Philostratus; H&S is unaware of this debt (xi. 39), and leads Coleridge’s annotators into a parallel error (Marginalia, ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), iv. 291–2); I take up Coleridge’s response to Ritson in Ch. 6.

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proximity between Cumberland and his contemporaries is twofold. They remind us that judgements passed on Jonson throughout the period are interdependent; and they cause us to attend closely to the sources and textures of critical writing at such moments as this, when shared, developing concerns can sometimes shade into less licit forms of adoption, adaptation, and imitation. Such coincidences are, moreover, apt: Cumberland’s own concerns offer an index of, and illuminate, his critical practice, for he is overridingly interested in the relationships of Jonson’s writing to previous texts. He points up a possible source for Mosca in Eupolis (noting, along the way, possible intermediary uses in Juvenal and Horace),33 and canvasses possible similarities between Macbeth and The Masque of Queens.34 Cumberland’s ‘Review of Ben Jonson’s comedy of the Fox’ is again concerned with the play’s imitative texture: In this drama the learned reader will find himself for ever treading upon classic ground; the foot of the poet is so fitted and familiarized to the Grecian sock, that he wears it not with the awkwardness of an imitator, but with all the easy confidence and authoritative air of a privileged Athenian: Exclusive of Aristophanes, in whose volume he is perfect, it is plain that even the gleanings and broken fragments of the Greek stage had not escaped him; in the very first speech of Volpone’s, which opens the comedy, and in which he rapturously addresses himself to his treasure, he is to be traced most decidedly in the fragments of Menander, Sophocles and Euripides, in Theognis and in Hesiod, not to mention Horace.35

Cumberland offers a source in Euripides for the one scene of Jonson’s which he explores at length, Volpone’s glistering aubade from i. i;36 of the play itself his praise is weighty, and weighted by a disclaimer of Shakespearean parallel: ‘I will venture an opinion that this drama of The Fox is, critically speaking, the nearest to perfection of any one drama, comic or tragic, which the English stage is at this day in possession of.’37 The closeness of Cumberland’s attention, not only to Jonson but to his commentators, is remarkable: though it speaks of a particularly eighteenth-century concern with imitation and originality, it does so in ways which render newly Jonson’s own relationship to earlier writers.

33

Cumberland, Observer, iii. 132–5. Ibid. iv. 141–6; the comparison had earlier been made by Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, ii. 174–9. 35 Cumberland, Observer, iv. 149–50. 36 It is accepted by H&S ix. 689. 37 Cumberland, Observer, iv. 156. 34

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At the same time, perhaps for the first time since his death, the full extent and generic diversity of Jonson’s achievement was beginning to be recognized. The selections from Jonson’s Discoveries edited by Joseph Warton (1787) marked the culmination of a longer interest on his part. Having been presented with the first four volumes of John Nichols’s A Select Collection of Poems,38 Warton wrote to Nichols on 7 May 1780 to suggest material for later volumes: As you have taken some Songs out of Dryden’s Plays, why should you not also take those Songs that Ben Jonson has inserted in his Plays, some of which are most elegant and harmonious? ‘Still to be neat, &c.’ in the Silent Woman, &c.; and some excellent lyric pieces, from what he calls his Underwood, To Charis 10 pieces, and An Ode, and Epistle to Selden.39

Though Warton’s suggestion was not taken up, a later collaboration with Nichols did—eventually—see print. Writing on 17 April 1784 of the ‘taste’ then ‘diffused for reading our old Poets’, Warton suggested that ‘some of our old Critics might be made as popular and pleasing’. Proposing to print from Sidney’s Defence of Poetry and Jonson’s Discoveries—‘Neither of these pieces are read frequently, because one is at the end of the Arcadia, into which few people look; and the other at the end of Jonson’s works, consisting, you know, of many volumes’—Warton forwarded Nichols a marked-up, re-punctuated copy of Discoveries nine days later.40 Notes, though suggested, were not supplied; copy for the title-page (‘just as I wish it to be printed’) was sent in December 1786, and in 1787 the volume was published.41 These circumstances are worth pausing over. Nichols, as we saw earlier, had printed Waldron’s Sad Shepherd in 1783: this later project again shows him willing to venture towards the edges of Jonson’s works, and away from the commercial solidity of the major Jacobean comedies. The arguments which Warton had urged privately on Nichols shape his printed introduction to the book; but where, in his letter to Nichols, Jonson’s works had occupied ‘many volumes’, they here were ‘very 38

John Nichols, ed., A Select Collection of Poems, 8 vols. (1780–2). John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London: the author, 1812–25), vi. 171. 40 Ibid. vi. 172–3; this seems not to have been the copy of the 1641 Works previously owned by Joseph Warton, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14754a Copy 2, whose pattern of annotation does not match this description. 41 Ibid. vi. 173; Joseph Warton, ed., Sir Philip Sydney’s Defence of Poetry and Observations on Poetry and Eloquence, from the Discoveries of Ben Jonson (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson et al., 1787). 39

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voluminous, and not all of equal value’.42 The elaboration is telling. Yet Joseph Warton’s reasons for valuing the Discoveries are none the less grounded in a larger conception of their author: Jonson’s prose, Warton writes, had ‘all that closeness and precision of style, weight of sentiment, and accuracy of classical learning, for which he is so justly celebrated’. But to read Warton’s Jonson is not, oddly enough, to be struck by a classicizing author: the Latin side-notes to Discoveries are omitted, and though most of the text is included (Warton omitted only the first 586 and last 5 lines),43 it lacks the critical annotation which would have explicated the dense allusiveness that structures the Discoveries. But this did not deprive it of influence: the impact of Warton’s little book on Wordsworth has been convincingly argued by Anne Barton.44 Jonson’s classicism was less benignly at issue in Henry Headley’s anthology, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, also published in 1787.45 In Headley’s account, Jonson lacks precisely that quality of ‘fancy’ that marked not only the writings of Shakespeare but a larger body of early modern writing with which English Romantic poetry was in the formative process of reconnecting itself. A discussion of Drayton introduces Jonson as a counter-example: While his contemporary, Jonson, studied away his fancy, and, unable to digest the mass of his reading, peopled his pages with the heathen mythology, and gave our language new idioms by the introduction of Latinisms*; Drayton adopted a style that, with a few exceptions, the present age may peruse without difficulty, and not unfrequently mistake for its own offspring.

Headley’s starred note elaborates on the contention: A strong and original vein of humour was Ben’s peculiar forte; take away that, and he is undeserving of the fame he has obtained. The best parts of him are written (to reverse what Dryden says of Shakespear), not luckily, but laboriously; he is frequently cumbrous without strength, but seldom or never strong without being cumbrous; he always betrays a drudging patience, but seldom a warm activity of mind; he often grovels, and but rarely soars; from a constant habit of 42 J. Warton, ed., Defence . . . and Observations, p. iii; the valuation is followed by Edmond Malone in The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden, ed. E. Malone, 3 vols. in 4 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1800), Ii. 60. 43 Line count follows H&S. 44 Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in 1802’, Essays in Criticism, 37 (1987), 209–33; Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 190–1. 45 Henry Headley, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1787); the Beauties were later revised by Henry Kett, 2 vols. (London: John Sharpe et al., 1810).

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walking on the crutches of authority and imitation, he soon lost the proper use of his legs. Not to mention his frequent crabbedness and obscurity. What are we to think of a writer in English, to the understanding of whom a tolerable share of Greek and Latin will not qualify us? Let every ancient claim his property, and Jonson will scarce have a rag left to cover his nakedness.46

The attack here is not conducted critically, but rather figuratively: Jonson’s work and person are elided; a biographical account shapes criticism of the text by its preconceptions about the life. Found (wrongly) entirely to lack the rich nationalism of Drayton’s verse, Jonson is dismissed as he had once charged Alexander Gill: go, you are stript.47 Philip Neve’s Cursory Remarks on Some of the Ancient English Poets, Particularly Milton (1790) shares much with Headley. Neve holds that few of Jonson’s dramatic works have retained their value, his fault having been to have ‘studied books, where he should have studied men’. Even The Sad Shepherd, praised for the beauty with which Earine’s death is related, falls victim to the same tendency: ‘so fatally did books associate with all combinations in Jonson’s mind, that he has, two pages afterwards, made his shepherds read, Helidorus, Achilles Tacitus, Longus, and other Greek romances’.48 George Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets, first published in 1790 but much reissued, includes only two poems and two songs;49 but Ellis’s specimens sort very oddly with his criticism of Jonson’s ‘harsh and discordant’ versification, which is, by a common figure, lumped in with the other expressions of ‘pedantry and affectation’ that James was held to have introduced at court.50 Critical estimations of Jonson’s poems here seem at odds with the evidence offered: the variety of these anthologies complement’s Jonson’s own, newly appreciated variety. Altogether more substantial was Edmond Malone’s edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, published in December 1790.51 46

Headley, Select Beauties, i. p. lii. Jonson, ‘An Answer to Alexander Gill’, UV 39; H&S viii. 410–11. 48 Philip Neve, Cursory Remarks on Some of the Ancient English Poets, Particularly Milton (London: the author, 1789), 39; this returns Jonson’s judgement ‘that Sidney did not keep a decorum in making everyone speak as well as himself ’ (Conversations with Drummond, 13–14; compare also 47–8, 537–8). 49 Ellis prints The Forest, 5 and 9; ‘Still to be neat’ from Epicæne, i. i; and ‘Beauties have you seen this toy’ from The Haddington Masque. 50 Text from the 4th ed.: George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, to which is Prefixed an Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the English Poetry and Language, 3 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1811), ii. 3, 4. 51 The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, ed. Edmond Malone, 10 vols. in 11 (London: J. Rivington et al., 1790). 47

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Declining to deal in matters of style or purely literary judgement, Malone saw starkly writ in the incontrovertible economics of publication history the absolute collapse of Jonson’s critical reputation. It is remarkable that in a century after our poet’s death, five editions only of his plays were published; which probably consisted of not more than three thousand copies. During the same period three editions of the plays of Fletcher, and four of those of Jonson, had appeared. On the other hand, from the year 1716 to the present time, that is, in seventy-four years, but two editions of the former writer, and one of the latter, have been issued from the press; while above thirty thousand copies of Shakspeare have been dispersed through England.52

Malone has his thumb on the scales, here, as well as an eye on a larger point: multiple single exempla (Malone’s ‘copies’) cannot fairly be measured against the tally of editions which they make up. But the point is none the less well made: the failure of Waldron’s projected revision of Whalley’s edition only emphasizes that Jonson’s plays would not be reprinted in their entirety until John Stockdale’s derivative, single-volume edition of 1811 (the poems, or selections from them, were printed more frequently, though omitted by Stockdale). The ‘intelligent saturation in his work as a whole’ for which T. S. Eliot later called was not easily available in such a period of partial reprinting.53 But for all Malone’s distaste for Jonson, an author he treats largely as a hostile witness to the dating of Shakespeare, his edition in some ways stands at the high-water mark of anti-Jonsonian sentiment. For an important contribution towards the remedying of the dispiriting publication situation described by Malone was made in 1793 with the first publication of volumes in Robert Anderson’s A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain.54 Anderson’s fourth volume offered a Life of Jonson, and the three major collections of poetry, together with selected songs from the plays and masques: it is evidence of the extent to which Jonson as a poet outweighed Jonson as a dramatist in this period. Anderson’s influence on certain readers was immense: Samuel Taylor Coleridge used three separate sets of the Poets of Great Britain over his reading career; some of the conclusions that can be drawn from that reading are surveyed in Part II. 52

The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, ed. E. Malone, Ii. p. lxxiii. Eliot, ‘Ben Jonson’, 148. 54 Robert Anderson, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, 14 vols. (London: John & Arthur Arch et al., 1793–1807); vols. 1–13 were published by 1795, the 14th being added in 1807. 53

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In the same year that Anderson’s series commenced, the second volume of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (the series began in 1791), marked the start of a long, productive, and largely unrecognized interest in Jonson on the writer’s behalf.55 D’Israeli would turn again to discussion of Jonson in his Quarrels of Authors (1814),56 in the second series of the Curiosities (1823),57 and in the very late Amenities of Literature (1841);58 and his unpublished correspondence with William Gifford proved crucial to the documentary discoveries of the latter’s edition.59 D’Israeli’s own conception of his undertaking was modest, and consistent throughout a long career; the Curiosities of Literature, he wrote, pretend to nothing more than the presentation of what appeared to him ‘amusive and curious’.60 Yet such studied indifference belies the research behind the Curiosities: though the extracts relating to Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson from Fuller’s Worthies might easily enough have been come by (ii. 111–13), the odes by Feltham and Randolph in response to The New Inn, printed alongside Jonson’s ‘Come leave the loathed stage’ (ii. 114–24) more accurately suggest D’Israeli’s industry. Probably derived from printed rather than manuscript copy, the two poems are sparingly annotated (largely from Langbaine); but for the first time the rationale of their publication is not so much literary as contextual, the texts illustrating D’Israeli’s contention that Jonson ‘possessed a great share of arrogance, and was desirous of ruling the realms of Parnassus with a despotic sceptre’. The explanatory frame within which the texts are printed by D’Israeli is, however, less important than their being printed at all: by recovering the material evidence of Jonson’s earlier reception, D’Israeli turns later accounts of Jonson away from

55 Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature: Consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations, Literary, Critical, and Historical, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1791–1817). 56 Isaac D’Israeli, Quarrels of Authors; or, Some Memoirs for our Literary History, including Specimens of Controversy to the Reign of Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1814). 57 Isaac D’Israeli, A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature: Consisting of Researches in Literary, Biographical, and Political History; of Critical and Philosophical Inquiries; and of Secret History, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1823). 58 Isaac D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature, 3 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1841). 59 The correspondence is Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dep. Hughenden 244/3, fols. 65–84; I discuss it in greater detail in the following chapter. 60 D’Israeli Curiosities, i. p. v. The Amenities of 1841 are introduced in similar fashion: recording the loss of his sight, he describes the papers in the collection as simply ‘a portion’ a larger ‘projected history’ (i. p. vii).

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opinion and towards a factual understanding of the writer’s presence in the minds and texts of others; by more fully understanding Jonson in his seventeenth-century contexts, he allows his late eighteenthcentury audience the possibility of a relativized awareness of their own predispositions. Two publications of the following decade stand as further examples of how approaches to Jonson were to alter towards a basis in contextual recovery and documentary discovery. The first, a series of engravings of literary, dramatic, and historical characters, accompanied by short biographies of their subjects by Malone, Waldron, and others, was gathered under the title of The Biographical Mirrour and published between 1795 and 1816.61 It contains no Life or print of Jonson but none the less locates him securely in the lives of his contemporaries. The accounts of Edward Alleyn, Richard Tarlton, Michael Drayton, Richard Martin, Richard Corbett, Prince Henry, and Venetia Digby all draw on Jonson’s writings. The treatment of the little-known Martin is in some ways exemplary: the dedication from Poetaster is cited, shared friendships with Selden and Hoskins are discussed, and the imputation that (as the writer puts it) Martin occasionally passed ‘the bounds of moderation in his sacrifices to Bacchus’ is excused by the examples of others: If any thing can extenuate this foible, perhaps it is the consideration that these indulgences might be in the celebrated Apollo, at the Devil-Tavern, the emporium of wit and wine; in the company, probably, of Jonson, Shakspeare, &c. the former of whom, it is well known, ‘carous’d potations pottle deep’.62

The importance of the Mermaid for Gifford’s biography of Jonson is discussed in the following chapter: what matters here is the convivial account offered of Jonson, among friends and contemporaries. Documents too were being uncovered. In The Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1796, Samuel Ayscough published four letters from Jonson to his patron the Earl of Newcastle from BL Harley MS 4955. Against the background of ongoing disputes over Ireland’s forged Vortigern, 61 [Anon.], The Biographical Mirrour, comprising a series of ancient and modern English portraits, of eminent and distinguished persons, from original pictures and drawings, 3 vols. (London: S. and E. Harding, 1795–?1812). This terminal date is suggested by the life of David Erskine Baker in vol. iii, which describes Stephen Jones’s revision of the Biographia (1812) as ‘the best of the kind that has yet issued from the press’; see also The Gentleman’s Magazine, 86 (June 1816), 540. 62 [Anon.], Biographical Mirrour, i. 145; the quotation is a less than happy memory of Othello, ii. iii. 49–50.

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Ayscough offered his genuine ‘Jonsonian fragments’;63 his work in cataloguing the newly acquired foundation collections of the British Museum in the previous decade had taken him into manuscript collections which were made newly accessible by the institution itself.64 New methods of cataloguing collections, and their movement from private into public ownership, play their part in changing versions of what ‘Jonson’ meant and how he was seen to be constituted. None the less, such new movements of mind and attention ought not to camouflage what are still most frequently hostile estimations of Jonson. Documentary research, for instance, clearly played little part in the ambitions behind Charles Dibdin’s Complete History of the English Stage (1797).65 Dibdin is quick to endorse Volpone’s apparent failure to hold the stage: ‘Quaint, dry, studied correctness, unsupported by quickness, spirit, and fire, can never satisfy.’66 Seldom can the qualities associated with an emergent Romanticism have been so starkly separated from an aetiolated classicism. In Dibdin’s account, Jonson’s work is bounded by, and reduced to, his life. He concludes the second of two chapters on Jonson as he had begun the first: Thus have we seen, in the works of jonson, the prototype of the man. They were full of fancied pomp, weight, and dignity, affected justice, truth, and persuasion, disguised rancour, malice, and envy, and real meanness, servility, and adulation. As a member of society he was haughty, rude, and overbearing; as a friend, mistrustful, treacherous, and unsafe; and, as a foe, dark, revengeful and dastardly.67

The relation of life to work is here brutally enjoined: the presumed character of the man, and the observed characteristics of the plays, are read off against one another in mutual support of an account whose hostility is evident throughout. Nathan Drake’s Literary Hours (1798) dealt with Jonson in similarly short order.68 Relating past to present literary taste, Drake comments: 63 The Gentleman’s Magazine 66 (1796), 91–2. Ten years earlier an anonymous contributor supplied a text of Jonson’s letter to Richard Briggs written in a copy of Farnaby’s Martial (The Gentleman’s Magazine, 56 (1786), 378). 64 Samuel Ayscough, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum (London: the author, 1782); P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973 (London: British Library, 1998). 65 Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the English Stage, 5 vols. (London: the author, 1797). 66 67 Ibid. iii. 294. Ibid. iii. 308. 68 Nathan Drake, Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative (Sudbury: the author, 1798). The Literary Hours were subsequently expanded to 2 vols. (Sudbury: T. Cadell and

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There was a period when the productions of Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, were preferred to those of Shakspeare. We are now astonished at the miserable taste of our ancestors: for of Jonson, the celebrated but pedantic Jonson, if we except two or three of his comedies, there is little commendatory to be said. His tragedies are tame and servile copies from the ancients, and though in his comedies of the Fox, the Silent Woman, and the Alchemist, the characters are strongly cast, and have both wit and humour, they are of a kind by no means generally relished or understood, nor would they now, nor probably will they hereafter, have any popularity on the stage.69

If, in A. E. Housman’s phrase, ‘1798 is in the literature of England what 1789 is in the polity of France’, then the date of Drake’s remarks, if coincidental, is, in a broader sense, convenient.70 Here the best recent account of Jonson’s reception, Craig’s Critical Heritage, leaves Jonson excluded, on the brink of the Romantic revolutions inaugurated by Lyrical Ballads, from both enjoyment and understanding.71 As I shall argue, however, a change in Jonson’s reception was really only just becoming evident at this point, and an account which stops (as Jonson appeared to) in 1798, can present only a partial and here inaccurate picture. Indeed, Drake’s relevance to the revisionary narrative I outline is that his later publications show in their changed opinions and emphases the strength of the critical realignment in Jonson studies. The new century saw a repackaging of the old. Waldron and Dibdin’s A Compendious History of the English Stage (1800), offered a glancing two-paragraph biography of Jonson with other material recycled from the Biographical Mirrour.72 An anonymous article in The Monthly Mirror in the following year returned to the terms in which Henry Headley had addressed Jonson to consider him amid a gallery of ‘Parallel Passages’ (or, as the subtitle more ominously had it: ‘Plagiary Considered’). The W. Davies, 1800), then 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804). The third volume added an essay ‘On the Life, Writings and Genius of Robert Herrick’ (iii. 25–88) in which Jonson’s influence on and association with Herrick is discussed. 69 Drake, Literary Hours (1798), 449–50; Literary Hours (1804), ii. 164–5, from which my text is taken. 70 A. E. Housman, Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 314. 71 On the still totemic date see Richard Cronin, ed., 1798: The Year of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 72 F. G. Waldron and Charles Dibdin, A Compendious History of the English Stage, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London: J. S. Jordan, 1800), n.p. George Chalmers, in A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers (London: Thomas Egerton, 1799), 235–44, had argued no less wearisomely in the previous year that the ‘Poet-Ape’ of Jonson’s Epigram 56 was Shakespeare.

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experience of reading Sejanus and Catiline, even for one who was familiar with Dryden’s account of Jonson’s classicism, is vividly presented: At one moment you are astonished in reading a translation, I was about to say a literal one, of a satire from Horace; in turning over a few pages, you meet with an oration from Cicero, not given in detached pieces, but whole sections translated into his works, word for word, in the most faithful manner; and had it not been for the art with which he managed his thefts, (for they are surely deserving of this harsh term,) the author of the above mentioned plays could only be considered by his warmest admirers in the light of a translator.73

Jonson’s ‘thefts’ are kept company by the forgery reported in WilliamHenry Ireland’s Confessions (1806), which blended whimsy and imitation with fabrication. Recalling having passed a portrait of Shakespeare to his father, Ireland writes: As I had left a broad space beneath the painting, I conceived that I might turn it to account, and for that purpose wrote the following lines, as from the pen of Ben Jonson, whereto I affixed his name; but, as the composition did not exactly please me, I took care to efface the whole previous to its delivery to Mr. Ireland; leaving, however, the signature of Jonson legible, which I had copied from his handwriting affixed to the first edition in folio of Shakspeare’s plays, which I had purchased of White, in Fleet Street, for thirty guineas, at which high price it was sold because conceived to be (and I have no doubt that it really was) the presentation copy from the editors of Shakspeare’s plays to Ben Jonson.74

If the book was genuine (and substantial doubt must remain), it has not been located.75 However, that this is likely to have been the sole Jonsonian forgery in my period tells its own, quiet tale. Diversely following the examples of Joseph Warton and George Ellis, in 1807 George Burnett published selections from Jonson’s Discoveries in his Specimens of English Prose-Writers.76 Extracting some 350 lines of Jonson’s ‘sensible observations’, Burnett comments on the falling off in Jonson’s reputation since Dryden styled him ‘the greatest man of the last age’: ‘the moderns are by no means disposed to award him applause so pre-eminent,’ he writes, with well-judged understatement; 73

Monthly Mirror, 11 (1801), 229–35. The Confessions of William-Henry Ireland (London: Thomas Goddard, 1806), 194. 75 Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, ii: A New Worldwide Census of First Folios (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), does, however, note a copy, not now located, sold at Sotheby’s (7 May 1801) by Samuel Ireland. 76 George Burnett, Specimens of English Prose-Writers, from the Earliest Times to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1807); 2nd edn. (London: John Bumpus, 1813), whose text I follow. 74

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in comparison with Shakespeare, even ‘a giant may sink into a pigmy’.77 The same year saw a portrait and biography of Jonson published anonymously in The Monthly Mirror. The account’s obvious sympathy towards Jonson is evident in the author’s recourse not to recent accounts of the subject but to ‘such authenticated materials, and traditional memorials, as appear to . . . deserve most regard’.78 The approach is not a guarantee of accuracy (Jonson’s visit to Hawthornden is dated to 1630, whereas it in fact took place over the winter of 1618/19), but the readiness to question the accusations of previous scholars, chief among them Malone, serve notice of a rigour in enquiry and a willingness to return to first principles that recur more strongly in the pamphlet which the article’s author, Octavius Gilchrist, published in the following year.79 Gilchrist’s An Examination of the Charges Maintained by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers and Others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity &c. Towards Shakspeare marks a sea change in critical attention.80 By comparison with the biographical and critical hearsay which Samuel Egerton Brydges had reported unchecked in his Censura Literaria of April 1808,81 and the character assassination of the ‘sullen and saturnine’ Jonson, addicted (like his emulator Shadwell) to ‘gross and coarse sensual indulgence, and profane conversation’, that Scott had purveyed in his Dryden of the same year,82 the tone of sanity and consideration which Gilchrist brought to the discussion was welcomed, as was his determination not to be swayed by the reputation of earlier commentators whose account of Jonson had been allowed to persist unchallenged: George Steevens 77 George Burnett, Specimens of English Prose-Writers, ii. 416–29 (giving ll. 669–759, 1697–1770, and 1926–2089 by H&S), at 430. 78 Monthly Mirror, ns 2 (July 1807), 4–10. 79 The biographical article was accompanied by an engraving of Jonson, taken from a portrait owned by Gilchrist’s friend Thomas Hill; moreover, the occurrence of the rare phrase ‘torve and tetrick countenance’ (from Thomas Fuller’s description of Lincoln Cathedral in The History of the Worthies of England (London: Thomas Williams, 1662), ii. 153) in both the Review and Gilchrist’s Examination decisively links the two texts; Gilchrist, who lived in Stamford, owned a 1662 Fuller, lot 425 in the sale of his library (London: Evans, 1824). 80 Octavius Gilchrist, An Examination of the Charges Maintained by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers and Others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity &c. Towards Shakspeare (London: Taylor & Hessey, 1808). 81 Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, with Original Disquisitions, Articles of Biography, and Other Literary Antiquities, 10 vols. 2nd edn. (London: Longman et al., 1815), vii. 130–5. 82 The Works of John Dryden, ed. Walter Scott, 18 vols. (London: William Miller, 1808), i. 94, x. 445, 456.

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and Edmond Malone are both courteously roughed up, even as Gilchrist is careful to establish his discussion (as he terms it) ‘in the face of’ their examples.83 Gilchrist’s scholarship fed directly into William Gifford’s edition of 1816, but its initial impact was also substantial. Partly this is a product of Gilchrist’s keenness to circulate his opinions; his exchange of letters with Walter Scott clearly shows this. Writing to Scott on 21 May 1808, he promised him a copy of the Examination, to be carried by Ballantyne: ‘when you have see[n] the tract,’ Gilchrist went on, ‘I shall be proud if you shall thi[nk] I have succeeded.’84 Scott replied on 9 June 1808: ‘you plead Ben’s cause very well & remove a great superstructure of exaggerati[on] and obloquy.’ None the less, he persisted in the opinion that ‘dissension’ had existed between Jonson and Shakespeare, even if ‘it went no further than the natural emulation betwixt two writers each so eminent in a very different stile might occasion & even justify.’85 Gilchrist’s reaction, in a letter of 27 August 1808, was to be gratified: I feel greatly pleased that I have generated a willingness in your mind to think that Ben is not so bad as he has been represented: it would have been indeed impossible that he should have seen with indifference Shakspeare outstripping him in the race of fame, but of that waspishness which is generated by envy I really cannot find any traces, and Ben was not of a nature to conceal his resentments.86

Gifford received a presentation copy in April 1808 (‘I shall read it with great pleasure, and meanwhile I thank you for it—first in old Ben’s name, and next in my own,’ he wrote);87 earlier in the month he had expressed pleasure at Gilchrist’s undertaking, and a keen appreciation of the work’s main surviving target: ‘I am glad to hear what you have done 83

Gilchrist, Examination, 18. NLS MS 3877, fol. 62r . Scott’s copy is not listed in Scott, Catalogue of the Library at Abbotsford, ed. George Huntley Gordon and J. G. Cochrane (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1838); on which see Jane Millgate, ‘ ‘‘Litera scripta manet’’: George Huntley Gordon and the Abbotsford Library Catalogue’, The Library, 6th ser. 29 (1998), 118–25. 85 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson et al., 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932–7), xii. 474. 86 NLS MS 3877, fol. 123r . The letter is printed, with minor divergences, in Sir Walter’s Post-Bag: More Stories and Sidelights from his Unpublished Letter-Books, ed. Wilfred Partington (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), 36–7. 87 Gifford to Gilchrist, undated: quotations from Gifford’s letters to Gilchrist are from their uncatalogued correspondence in the John Murray Archive (JMA), and are made with the permission of Mrs Virginia Murray and the John Murray Archive, with whom copyright resides. 84

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for Ben: if Malone should send you a challenge, you will, of course, think of me for a second.’88 A review of Gilchrist’s Examination in The British Critic proved prophetic. Praising not only the importance of the task which Gilchrist had set himself, but the ‘perfect success’ with which he had accomplished it, the reviewer demurred only at the pamphlet’s occasional severity and sarcasm, ‘the accustomed liberty of disputants.’ It lines up squarely behind Jonson: We rejoice that his fame will next be in the hands of a man, whose judgment is not likely to err, and whose spirit will always rise to oppose injustice*; and we doubt not, that the promised edition of Ben Jonson will contain, among other excellencies, a full confutation of every unfounded charge against that injured poet.

As the starred note made clear to those unable to recognize the eulogy, that judicious and spirited editor was William Gifford.89 I discuss the making and reception of his edition, published in 1816, in the following chapter; though it is of course part of Jonson’s critical fortunes in this period, it demands detailed attention not possible within the scope of this chapter. Partly, at least, that is because 1808 also saw, as well as Gilchrist’s Examination, the publication of Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare. Lamb’s aim, as he described it, was to show ‘how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind’.90 His selections from Jonson drew not only on the major Jacobean comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist, but encompassed the full range of Jonson’s dramatic writing, from The Case is Altered to The Sad Shepherd.91 The breadth of his choice refutes Bryan Waller Procter’s reductive (if unmalicious) suggestion that Lamb liked Jonson merely ‘for his humour’; instead, it suggests the depth and taste of his anthologizing talents.92 Besides the influence of his selections, 88 Gifford to Gilchrist, 20 Apr. 1808: JMA; Gifford’s copy of the Examination is unlocated; Malone’s copy is now in the Bodleian (Malone E 35). 89 ‘Gilchrist on Ben Jonson and Shakspeare’, The British Critic, 32 (1808), 289–93. The index entry, in anticipative telegraphese, reads: ‘Jonson, Ben, not ‘‘envious’’ of Shakspeare’. 90 Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare (London: Longman et al., 1808), p. vi. 91 Lamb’s later notes on the Jonsonian concerns of Aphra Behn’s Dutch Lover and Dekker’s Satiromastix are now respectively BL Add. MSS 9955, fols. 12v –14v and 9956, fols. 43v –44v . 92 ‘Recollections of Charles Lamb,’ The Athenæum, 378 (24 Jan. 1835), 72.

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the short notes he appended to the extracts drew attention also: Keats marked two passages in the notes to The Case is Altered and The Alchemist in his copy.93 Coleridge had earlier seen the Specimens in manuscript, having (as he told Thomas De Quincey) ‘walked to and from Lambe’s to procure’ them.94 They were part of a more continued advocacy on Lamb’s part: in June 1811, an evening spent with Lamb led Henry Crabb Robinson to record that he had ‘looked over’ Jonson later that night; in August of the same year, Lamb rebuked Crabb Robinson’s mention of ‘poor Coleridge’, apparently by quoting at a somewhat puzzled companion Jonson’s praise of Bacon from Discoveries.95 At the end of the decade, Hazlitt relied upon Lamb for texts and stimulus in the preparation of his ‘Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth’.96 Partial this anthology may have been; without influence it certainly was not. The coincidence of the two publications is important: Gilchrist’s critical defence complements Lamb’s advocacy of Jonson’s dramatic merits. Gilchrist, with Brutus’s words from Julius Caesar on his mind, commented on the Jonsonian synchronicity in a second pamphlet, A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. on the Late Edition of Ford’s Plays, published in 1811: ‘‘There is a tide in the affairs’’ of poets, however, as well as of ordinary men, and it seemed to have turned in favour towards the dawn of the nineteenth century; for, in the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, according to the christian [sic] computation of time, a great luminary of English literature, ycleped Charles Lamb,—already known to the world by a small tale or romance, facetiously termed by the inhabitants of Paternoster-row Lamb’s Tail,—put forth ‘‘Specimens of Dramatic Authors,’’ in two modest and unostentatious volumes.97

Gilchrist’s facetious, overworked tone does him few favours here—but the observation is just. The interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama fostered by Lamb’s Specimens was evident not only among the reading 93 Helen Haworth, ‘Keats’s Copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970), 419–27. 94 2 Feb. 1808, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), iii. 51. 95 Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1938), i. 34 (4 June 1811), i. 43 (3 Aug. 1811, referring either to Discoveries, 884–98, which is a wonderful evocation, avant la parole, of Coleridge lecturing, or, more probably, 945–8). 96 The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), v. p. xvii. 97 Octavius Gilchrist, A Letter to William Gifferd, Esq. on the Late Edition of Ford’s Plays (London: John Murray, 1811), 15, recalling Julius Caesar, iv. ii. 270.

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public but among the printers, publishers, and booksellers of PaternosterRow and elsewhere in London: witness the editions of John Ford and of Beaumont and Fletcher edited by Scott’s amanuensis Henry Weber,98 and, more importantly, the decision of the publisher John Stockdale to venture in 1811 a single-volume edition of Jonson, which can clearly be seen as a commercial recognition of the climate of appreciation to which Lamb’s work had given rise.99 This tide, turning (for once) in Jonson’s favour, led on to an increased interest in, and positive estimation of, his works. But such currents ought not to obscure the political distance between Gilchrist, Lamb, and their acquaintances, a distance that became more evident in the following years. Lamb and Gilchrist created a taste by which Jonson could be enjoyed only to the extent that that taste became politicized. Leigh Hunt wrote in 1819 that Lamb’s work was ‘plundered by the Anti-Jacobin enemy’.100 Hunt has his eye firmly on Gifford here, the first editor of The Anti-Jacobin Review, who, as editor of The Quarterly Review, was now able to engage his friends in discussion of those new publications on Jonson that followed after 1808. Weber’s work in particular was ferociously reviewed by Gilchrist and Gifford;101 no less harshly received was Stephen Jones’s revision of Reed’s Biographia Dramatica (1812), which Gilchrist reviewed for the Quarterly, taking his cue from Gifford’s estimation of the work: ‘Murray has just sent me the 98 The Dramatic Works of John Ford, ed. Henry Weber, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Constable et al., 1811); The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Henry Weber, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1812). 99 The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley and Alexander Chalmers (London: John Stockdale, 1811). The edition was probably the (unacknowledged) work of Alexander Chalmers: its ‘Life’ of Jonson (pp. iii–viii) incorporated material, heavily abridged, from the ‘Life’ printed in Alexander Chalmers, ed., The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, 21 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1810), v. 443–57; Chalmers reprinted this material again in 1815 in The General Biographical Dictionary, 32 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1812–17), xix. 140–59. It was later acknowledged as an important source for the account of Jonson in Francis Wrangham, ed., The British Plutarch, Containing the Lives of the Most Eminent Divines, Patriots, Statesmen, Warriors, Philosophers, Poets, and Artists, of Great Britain and Ireland, new edn., 6 vols. (London: J. Mawman et al., 1816), ii. 575–602. 100 The Examiner, 14 Mar. 1819, p. 173. 101 Quarterly Review, 6 (Dec. 1811), 462–87, wrongly attributed to Barron Field and Gifford by Hill Shine and Helen Chadwick Shine, The Quarterly Review under Gifford: Identification of Contributors, 1809–1824 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1949). I find that my reattribution has been independently confirmed by Jonathan Burke Cutmore, ‘The Quarterly Review under Gifford: Some New Attributions’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 24 (1991), 137–42, and idem, ‘The Early Quarterly Review 1809–24: New Attributions and Sources’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 27 (1994), 308–18.

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new Edition of Biog. Dramatica. The Editor, I see, is one Jones. An idiot is he not?’102 And when, in 1814, Isaac D’Israeli’s Quarrels of Authors contained a long discussion of Jonson and Dekker, it was careful to guard against an immediate rebuttal in the form of Gifford’s edition, which he knew contradicted his account.103 William Godwin’s account of ‘the literary character of Jonson’ in his Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (1815) nicely articulates a paradox that repeatedly attends on Jonson’s posthumous reputation: ‘out of his very excellence, the ill-nature of imaginative criticism has drawn the ingredients with which to demolish the better part of his fame’. The ‘ill-nature’ of the criticism Godwin addresses is oddly seen to be a product of Jonson’s nature: Many have concluded, because he had a manly severity and steadiness of judgment, that he had a cold and unsusceptible spirit, that his writings are uniformly rugged and harsh, and that he was devoured with malice and envy towards his illustrious contemporaries. This is not a bad specimen of the way in which mankind is apt, from a few scattered hints, to fill up a portrait. It must be confessed there is some keeping in the design; its fault is, that it has no pretensions to likeness.104

The ‘ruggedness’ of style discussed by Samuel Johnson returns in Godwin’s account; so too does the repeated tendency to align Jonson’s writings with his character. Godwin is not immune to the attractions of such perceived biographical transparency in the writing—he devotes an awkward four pages to the contention that ‘in his youth’ Jonson was ‘enamoured of a lady, called Celia’, and that when he had ‘somewhat passed the meridian of human life’ he fell in love again, this time with Charis—but he usefully isolates the metonymic tendency by which an account of Jonson’s writing can stand for an account of his life and character.105 In Gifford’s 1816 edition the relation of Jonson’s life to his work was radically reshaped (as I discuss in greater detail in the following 102 Stephen Jones, ed., Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse, 3 vols. in 4 (London: Longman et al., 1812); Octavius Gilchrist, ‘Jones’s Biographia Dramatica’, Quarterly Review, 7 (1812), 282–92; Gifford to Gilchrist, JMA. 103 D’Israeli, Quarrels of Authors, iii. 121–67. 104 William Godwin, Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (London: Longman et al. 1815), 390. 105 On the tendencies of such biographical readings, see Ian Donaldson, ‘The Story of Charis’, in his Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 143–61.

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chapter); this, in turn, radically altered critical estimations of Jonson. Nathan Drake’s reaction to Jonson in 1798 had been astonishment at the ‘miserable taste’ of an audience preferring his works to Shakespeare’s, and a prediction that the plays would never again enjoy popularity on the stage.106 But in Shakspeare and his Times (1817) he was writing in entirely different terms of Jonson, a change largely effected (as Drake acknowledged) by the critical and editorial work of the previous decade. In 1817 Drake was still concerned with differences between the dramatic practice of Jonson and Shakespeare: his well-subscribed ‘school of Shakspeare’ and its contrast, a school of Jonson (chiefly remarkable for having only Jonson on its roll), expresses a fundamental distinction in method, but tellingly does so without recourse to evaluative condescension; the ‘Romantic drama’ of the Shakespeareans, though contrasted with the more ‘classical construction’ of Jonson’s work, is not automatically preferred to it. Indeed, Drake offers at the close of a survey of Jonson’s dramatic works a remarkable return upon his earlier judgement: The fair fame of Jonson which, both in a moral and dramatic light, has, for more than a century, been overwhelmed by a cloud of ignorance and prejudice, now brightens with more than pristine lustre, through the liberal and generous efforts of some accomplished scholars of the present day; and if ever it be permitted to departed spirits to witness the transactions of this sublunary sphere, with what delight and gratitude must the spirit of the injured bard look down upon the labours of his learned friends, upon the noble and disinterested protection of a Gilchrist, a Godwin, and a Gifford!107

The distance travelled since 1798 is remarkable: precisely because Drake was content to report rather than shape opinion, and because he dealt more in matters of consensus than of controversy, the judgements of Shakspeare and his Times matter. It would be wrong, however, to think that Drake’s ready response to Gilchrist, Godwin, and Gifford signalled an entirely new dispensation; rather, it should alert us to the extent to which Jonson, after 1816, is identified with, and written about at the same time as, his editor. In August 1818, The British Critic dealt more substantively with the edition, endorsing Gifford’s refutation of ‘the numerous accusations . . . heaped upon the unoffending bard’. But, for all Gifford’s 106

Drake, Literary Hours (1798), 449–50. Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1817), ii. 573. 107

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success, ‘the entire perusal’ of Jonson’s Works remained for the reviewer, resenting having had ‘to toil through’ much ‘tediousness’, ‘a labour to be undertaken once and then for very special reasons only’. Even this, ‘not only the best edition extant of the works of Ben Jonson, but the best commentary upon the works of any poet in our language’, still had not wholly created conditions under which Jonson was fully appreciated.108 The Specimens of the British Poets edited by Thomas Campbell in 1819 gave further evidence that Gifford’s edition had, as Alexander Chalmers predicted in 1810, superseded Whalley’s.109 Campbell’s Specimens, published by Murray, paid two related compliments to Gifford’s work: it accepted the overthrow of what had been ‘an established article of literary faith’, chastising Reed, Malone, and Scott for accepting the ‘traditionary calumnies against the memory of Jonson’; and it followed Gifford’s text in printing the wrongly ascribed ‘Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke’ in a selection from The Underwood.110 Campbell’s account, though, was not entirely reverential: drawing on Drake’s Shakspeare and his Times,111 he contrasts ‘the wildness and sweetness’ of Jonson’s masques with the ‘stern and rigid (and sometimes rugged) air of truth’ that prevails in his comedies. Jonson’s classicism is measured by a Shakespearean standard: In the regular drama he certainly holds up no romantic mirror to nature. His object was to exhibit human characters at once strongly comic and severely and instructively true; to nourish the understanding, while he feasted the sense of ridicule. He is more anxious for verisimilitude than even for comic effect. He understood the humours and peculiarities of his species scientifically, and brought them forward in their greatest contrasts and subtlest modifications. If Shakespeare carelessly scattered illusion, Jonson skilfully prepared it.112

The hard, scientific rationality of Jonson’s surfaces, the regularity of his observations and effects, here have deadening overtones of didactic pedantry; his constructed, prepared art nourishes not the body organically but the understanding artificially. Yet, even as hedged as this account is, its estimation of the positive within Jonson’s writing is substantial. 108

The British Critic, ns 10 (1818), 183–99. Chalmers, ed., Works of the English Poets, v. 457. See H&S viii. 433–4; I discuss the attribution of this poem, and Robert Southey’s response to it, more fully in Ch. 7. 111 Compare Thomas Campbell, ed., Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols. (London: John Murray, 1819), iii. 156–7 with Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, ii. 572. 112 Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, i. 159. 109

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At first glance the decision of The Retrospective Review to dedicate an article not to the Works (1816) but to the Workes (1616) might appear as an attempt to side-step the issues raised by Gifford. Yet the congruence of the terms in which the newly founded Retrospective described its own aims with those in which it praised Jonson’s work rapidly dispels such a notion. Describing a reading public suffering under the ‘enervating effects’ of modern publishing, its time and thoughts occupied by ‘newspapers, reviews, pamphlets, magazines, the popular poetry, the popular romances, together with new voyages and travels’, the Retrospective’s polemical ‘Introduction’ offered a corrective to ‘so diluted a diet’, lauding earlier English literature, ‘the most rich, varied, and comprehensive, of any in the world’, over the delinquencies of the present.113 Jonson perfectly accorded with these aims. Praising his ‘antient simplicity of style’, his ‘severest morals’, his ‘chastest methods’, and his commitment to ‘engaging the judgment in the assistance of fancy’, the reviewer offers reading Jonson as a healthy alternative: We cannot, perhaps, expect that the novel-reading lady should prefer Ben Jonson to her piquante food, but we will, at least, do her and her sentimental male gossips the service to shew them, that the solid fare which honest Ben has prepared for their palates is of a description which will not disgust by its homeliness, nor pall by its false relish. Mr. Gifford’s admirable edition, at all events, is within their reach and may, by its more modern type, if not by its excellent explanations, afford some excuse to a fashionable friend for its lying on a reading desk.114

The energies at work in this passage offer Jonson’s masculine classicism, a version of what was once called his plain style,115 and the clarifications of his editor, against a caricatured portrayal of a feminized, even effeminate, domestic reading public. In so doing it is profoundly reactionary, and conscripts Jonson to a ready formulated conservative agenda: though Jonsonian in conception, such satirical intent seemed little calculated to gain him new readers. 113 ‘Introduction’, The Retrospective Review, 1 (1820), pp. i–xvii; see further Jane Campbell, ‘The Retrospective Review’ (1820–28) and the Revival of Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Waterloo, Ont.: Waterloo Lutheran University, 1972). 114 ‘Ben Jonson’s Works’, Retrospective Review, 1 (1820), 181–200, at 182. The impact of Gifford’s edition as book was also substantial: besides the ‘modern type’ discussed here, large-paper copies of Robert Dodsley, Isaac Reed, Octavius Gilchrist, and John Payne Collier, eds., A Select Collection of Old Plays, 12 vols. (London: Septimus Prowett, 1825–7), were printed so as to sit ‘uniformly’ alongside Gifford’s tall volumes (ii. 4). 115 Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962); Ian Donaldson has questioned this account in ‘Perishing and Surviving: The Poetry of Donne and Jonson’, Essays in Criticism, 51 (2001), 68–85.

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The short biography of Jonson in Lucy Aikin’s Memoirs of the Court of King James the First is clear about its debts.116 Examining Jonson’s ‘claims’ to ‘the admiration of his contemporaries and the remembrance of posterity’, Aikin clearly derives her emphases from Gifford.117 Aikin’s acknowledgement of her source is revealing: Gifford, she wrote, seemed ‘to have successfully vindicated the character of his author from the charges of envy and malignity towards Shakespear brought against him, in many instances with so striking a disregard of truth and justice, by the editors and commentators of the great dramatist’.118 Jonsonian sociability, one of the key elements of post-Gilchrist accounts, takes on another guise in the historical fantasy of Nathan Drake’s Noontide Leisure (1824): a novella set in the last year of Shakespeare’s life, in which, besides a multiplicity of recovered children and eventual marriages, Jonson makes regular, and often well-oiled, appearances.119 If Drake’s ‘Tale of the Days of Shakspeare’, despite its obvious indebtedness, falls a long way short of Scott’s achievements in the historical novel, at least some of its difficulties stem from its author’s having tried to align revisionary literary history with narrative demands. In the following representative section, Jonson, we are told, has gone out of his way to pass through Stratford in order that he might ‘pay his respects to his earliest dramatic friend, Will Shakspeare’: The meeting between these two now celebrated men, was in the highest degree frank and cordial. They had not seen each other for more than two years, and though for some time previous to the retirement of Shakspeare from the stage, the public had considered them as rival candidates for fame, yet this fancied antagonism had not for a moment interrupted their friendship, or vitiated their due estimation of each others [sic] talents. On the contrary, Jonson loved Shakspeare with an ardour almost filial, and never ceased to consider him as the most original and creative genius which poetry had hitherto seen, The applause, delight, and wonder of the stage, as he afterwards termed him; whilst the latter returned the affection of honest Ben, with warmth, and with a sincere and just admiration for his learning, judgment, and inexhaustible vein of humour. 116 Lucy Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of King James the First, 2 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1822). 117 118 Ibid. i. 151, 157. Ibid. i. 157. 119 Nathan Drake, Noontide Leisure; or, Sketches in Summer, Outlines from Nature and Imagination, and including A Tale of the Days of Shakspeare, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1824).

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‘Give me thy hand, my dear Ben,’ exclaimed the bard of Avon; ‘right glad am I to see thee! Marry, this chance makes amends for all disappointments!—I had begun to think my old friends in the city had forgotten me.’ ‘Why, Master Shakespeare,’ replied Jonson, returning the salutation in his usual blunt manner, and with the utmost glee, whilst at the same time, however, the dewy lustre in his eye told the feelings of his heart, ‘if you will linger here picking of daisies, and babbling of green fields, instead of rejoining your former fellows and goodwishers round a bowl of sack at the Mermaid, God’s my life! it cannot chance but you will sometimes slip even from the recollection of your warmest admirers; though I must say for myself, and that truly too, that go where thou wilt, mine excellent friend, the memory of Will Shakspeare, his mind, and manners, will never away from my heart.’120

If quotation at this length seems cruel both to reader and writer, the full extent of Drake’s essay in recuperative literary-critical biographical narrative serves only to confirm the extent to which accounts of Jonson were disputed, adapted, and adopted in a hugely disparate number of modes. Drake, here mixing clunking dialogue with some hardly subtle touches for the scholarly reader to appreciate (Theobald can scarcely have imagined that his emendation to the folio text of Henry V ‘a Table of greene fields’ (TLN 839) would find itself so oddly transposed), has none the less a serious purpose, in keeping with the revaluation of Jonson’s life and work signalled earlier in his Shakspeare and his Times. This Jonson, despite a propensity for wine and women, is imagined through the lens of earlier and changing critical accounts: as one participant in the fiction, Eustace Montchensey, inimitably puts it, moments before Jonson makes a play for his daughter: Yes, Master Jonson, much as I laud you for your truly classic and most judicious works, for your right pithy, humorous, and ever-to-be-admired comedies, I praise you still more for the warmth of friendship, and deep feeling of esteem which, I now plainly see, you inwardly cherish for our ever honoured host; a friendship, the memory of which, in spite of all that malevolence, now or hereafter, may bring forward to the contrary, shall endure to distant times!121

Written under the influence of amity, this crashingly bad novella indicates the establishment of a new consensus, offering to Jonson and those who would read him a new dispensation. The malevolence on which Drake has his character comment is here, radically, not Jonson’s, but rather that of the critical tradition: the situation had been reversed. 120 121

Drake, Noontide Leisure, i. 176–8. Ibid. i. 186.

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II Jonson’s character changed in 1808, a revaluation confirmed in 1816. Thomas Warton, discussing in 1781 Jonson’s collaboration with Marston and Chapman in Eastward Ho!, had suggested that the ‘association gave Jonson an opportunity of throwing out many satirical parodies on Shakespeare with more security’. Jonson, on Warton’s account, was (as we have seen) ‘commonly too proud, either to assist, or to be assisted’, such that his collaboration with two other dramatists was itself remarkable; the satirical parodies there detected were offered as further evidence of Jonson’s malignant nature, on which Warton had dwelt elsewhere.122 Richard Price’s note to this passage in the 1824 edition of Warton’s History revealed a change, and also the publication chiefly held to have effected it: ‘Warton has here adopted the current slander of his day. It has been reserved for a distinguished critic of our own times, to clear the friend of Shakespeare from this unmerited and foul reproach. See Jonson’s Works by William Gifford, esq.’123 A. W. Schlegel’s no less influential Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, translated by John Black in 1815, reveal that shift even more starkly to an English reading audience. In Black’s translation Schlegel comments that Jonson assumed a superiority over Shakspeare on account of his school learning, the only point in which he really had an advantage; he introduced all sorts of biting allusions into his pieces and prologues, and reprobated more especially those magical flights of fancy, the peculiar heritage of Shakspeare, as contrary to genuine taste.124

A long note in R. H. Horne’s edition of Schlegel’s Lectures (1840) offered a broader and longer perspective on the works that had established (and those which had subsequently altered) the consensus: It is to be regretted that so able and intelligent a writer as Schlegel should have adopted the absurd and improbable charges against Jonson, originated by Dryden, and perpetuated by Malone and his followers. Mr. Gilchrist was the first who evinced sufficient honesty to investigate the truth, in his ‘Examination of the charges maintained by Malone, Chalmers, and others, of Jonson’s enmity, 122 Warton, History of English Poetry, iii. 447; idem, The Life and Literary Remains of Ralph Bathurst (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761), 148 n. 123 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, ed. Richard Price, 4 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1824), iv. 276. 124 A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2 vols. (London: Baldwin et al., 1815), ii. 281–2.

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&c. towards Shakspeare,’ published in 1808; and his statement startled, though it did not convince, these detractors. He was followed by Mr. Gifford, who, in the preliminary matter to his admirable edition of Jonson’s Works, has triumphantly demolished the so called ‘Proofs of Jonson’s malignity.’ The closing words of his energetic defence of the calumniated Poet, are remarkable, and calculated to prevent any erroneous impressions which Schlegel’s circumstantial censure is likely to convey. ‘I cannot, (he says) avoid thinking it more than time to disencumber the pages of our great poet from the wretched obloquy with which they are every where surcharged, and to present him at length to the world, undefiled and undebased by a disgusting repetition of absurd, and rancorous abuse on the sincerest of his admirers, the warmest of his panegyrists, and the most constant and affectionate of his friends, ben jonson.’125

The two notes offer a picture of how the shared opinions that had obtained in an interpretative community since Dryden’s time were questioned and, finally, judged to have lost their usefulness. We might judge now that, rather than freeing Jonson criticism from the twinned pressures of biography and morality, the organizing concepts had simply changed their polarity, friendship replacing enmity; but we should not therefore underestimate the importance or the force of such changes. For Jonsonian friendship comes to serve as a powerful organizing concept in the period, at work not only in the structure and reception of Gifford’s edition in 1816 but, as I argue in the following chapter, valuable today as a means of understanding the evaluative stance and critical methodologies adopted in the edition within the networks of sociability that provided much of its material. 125 A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2nd edn., ed. R. H. Horne, 2 vols. (London: T. Templeman and J. R. Smith, 1840), ii. 291–2 n.

4

Editorial Jonson Asked by Robert Anderson, editor of A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (1793–1807), for his thoughts on a projected collaborative edition of Ben Jonson, the Irish lawyer William Preston wrote bluntly in April 1806 that such an undertaking ‘would not answer’: ‘it would be a work of immense Labour, productive of little Reputation’.1 In a letter to the Reverend Edward Foster of the previous year, Walter Scott had hoped for ‘a handsome & complete Ben Jonson which’, he added, ‘I have long thought a great desideratum—he is one of our neglected classics’.2 Neither edition appeared.3 Why might this have been so? No complete edition of Jonson’s works had been successfully attempted since Whalley’s in 1756; that published in 1811 by John Stockdale simply reprinted Whalley’s text and notes in a different format. When The Works of Ben Jonson, in Nine Volumes. With Notes Critical and Explanatory, and a Biographical Memoir, By W.Gifford, Esq. were published in the summer of 1816 by a syndicate of stationers headed by George Nicol, it was the first new edition of Jonson’s works for sixty years; though it was reprinted and later lightly revised by other editors, it was not wholly replaced until the final volume of the Oxford Jonson was published in 1952. But if its historical importance has long been appreciated,4 it is often accorded only diffident praise, and on occasion something rather less than that.5

1 NLS MS 22.4.14, fol. 175v ; cited from W. E. K. Anderson, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & Robert Anderson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 248. The project was not continued; Anderson wrote to Percy on 11 Mar. 1807 that ‘By the death of my friend Preston, our edition of Jonson is abandoned’. 2 Scott to Foster, 27 Oct. 1805: The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson et al., 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932–7), i. 267. 3 Nor had that proposed by James Bindley in 1790: see his notes in Edinburgh University Library MS La.II.422/141. 4 H&S ix. 142–51 offer a scrupulous account, and somewhat less charitable appreciation; still the best discussion, this offers an advance on C. H. Herford’s earlier brusque characterization of the edition’s ‘faulty text and faultier notes’ (DNB x. 1079). 5 Robert C. Evans, ‘Jonson’s Critical Heritage’, in Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 188–201; R. B. Clark, in what remains Gifford’s only biography, writes: ‘In annotation

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This chapter offers a historicized account of the making and reception of Gifford’s edition, an account that seeks to understand its impact on Jonson’s reception in the years after 1816.6

I Gifford’s volumes presented a social Jonson: he conceived of the edition in terms that ally themselves closely with, and were formed by, a Jonsonian understanding of friendship, a structure of moral understanding which has as much to do with personal as with literary relations.7 As the previous chapter suggested, this conception of Jonson, relatively modest and unglamorously non-theoretical, none the less marked a radical departure from the stability of the critical consensus that had attached itself to ‘surly Ben’ through the eighteenth century: to take Jonson seriously as a social and socialized writer was to go against long-prevailing trends. Because of this, Gifford’s edition needs understanding today in precisely the terms in which it sought to understand Jonson. For the 1816 Works, as well as paying unprecedented attention to the networks of Jonson’s friendship, was remarkably the product of the networks of Gifford’s friendships; the means by which the edition was able to attend so innovatively (and, I believe, instructively) to Jonson’s affiliations were, in large measure, Gifford’s affiliations.8 Even when the literary and editorial friendship offered by Gifford to Jonson runs at variance with the personal friendships of his own life, the system of values which the edition attributes to, and constructs around, Jonson is unquestioned. Later, I argue that it is precisely this system of friendship which, eyed

and interpretation, this edition is as untrustworthy as in textual criticism’ (William Gifford: Tory Satirist, Critic, and Editor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 151); Clark’s now very dated work should be supplemented by Stephen Tunnicliffe, ‘A Newly Discovered Source for the Early Life of William Gifford’, Review of English Studies, 16 (1965), 25–34. 6 I do so with the example of D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 55 in mind. 7 This emphasis on Jonson’s valuation of friendship is not new (see D. H. Rawlinson, ‘Ben Jonson on Friendship’, English, 29 (1980), 203–17); but the relation between it and the way in which Jonson was edited is. 8 On the idea of the ‘network’ see Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Reconstructing Manuscript Networks: The Textual Transactions of Sir Stephen Powle’, in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds., Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 18–37; and Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 71.

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awry, so enlivens William Hazlitt’s response to the edition and its editor: what had been friendship in Gifford’s eyes becomes political sycophancy in Hazlitt’s. Friendship and enmity keep uneasy company in this chapter of Jonson’s reception. The edition’s friends, during its making, were many. John Dent loaned Gifford his copy of the 1616 folio, itself a presentation gift from Jonson to Francis Young; Gifford returned the volume in April 1815, with his apologies for having ‘kept your valuable copy a most unmerciful time’.9 John Philip Kemble gave Gifford access to his library after an introduction orchestrated by a mutual friend, John Taylor; he later expressed a desire to ‘look at a sheet or two of Old Ben’.10 So too, Gifford warmly acknowledged Richard Heber’s ‘unprecedented kindness’ and ‘liberality’ in providing manuscript and printed witnesses to Jonson’s text from his collections.11 Some measure of Heber’s kindness can perhaps be inferred from the manuscript ‘Catalogue of Single Plays in small Quarto’ which he drew up some time after 1804: though it contains four plays by Shakespeare, twelve by Ford, fifteen by Beaumont and Fletcher, and two full sides listing his holdings of Shirley, no Jonson is present.12 Since the Heber sales of 1834–5 demonstrate massively that he did own Jonson, the tantalizing possibility is that the ‘missing’ Jonson quartos in the manuscript catalogue were on loan to Gifford.13 Heber’s manuscript of The Gipsies Metamorphosed, now Huntington MS HM 741, is but one more example of the same point: Gifford’s use of this manuscript, a prime witness for what is perhaps the most editorially complex of Jonson’s masques, is attested not only by 9 It is now in the library of the Elizabethan Club, Yale University: see Stephen Parks, The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and its Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 142–3; I quote from a letter of Gifford’s now tipped into the volume’s endpapers. 10 John Taylor, Records of My Life, 2 vols. (London: Edward Bull, 1832), ii. 54–5; Herschel Baker, John Philip Kemble: The Actor in his Theatre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 219–23. 11 1816, i. p. ccxlvii. On Heber’s collection see Arnold Hunt, ‘A Study in Bibliomania: Charles Henry Hartshorne and Richard Heber’, The Book-Collector, 42 (1993), 24–43, 185–212; idem, ‘Bibliotheca Heberiana’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Antiquaries, Book Collectors and the Circles of Learning (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1996), 83–112; and idem, ‘The Sale of Richard Heber’s Library, 1834–1837’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Under the Hammer: Book Auctions since the Seventeenth Century (London: British Library, 2001), 143–65. 12 Bodleian MS Eng. Misc. c.407, fols. 139–51. Written on seven sheets of a single stock of paper, folded in folio, and watermarked ‘GR | 1804’, the catalogue is otherwise undated. 13 Individual exempla make the point more forcefully than references to sale catalogues: NAL Dyce 25.A.84 is one of Heber’s three copies of Volpone (1607); Bodleian Malone 860 his copy of Chloridia (1630); BL 841.a.1, The Characters of Two Royal Masques (1608), and BL G11211, The Masque of Queens (1609) are also Heber copies.

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his printed acknowledgements to Heber (vii. 366), but by the inscription in his hand (previously unidentified) on the manuscript’s endpapers.14 The cumulative effect of these examples is to reinforce the contention that only by taking seriously the thanks which Gifford offered seriously to friends and associates in 1816 are we able properly to understand the nature of his achievement.15 Most important among Gifford’s friends was the Stamford antiquary Octavius Gilchrist. The help he had provided in the Examination was critical; but he also helped Gifford practically. Gifford’s long, unpublished correspondence with Gilchrist, now in the archives of their joint publisher, John Murray, provides not only a detailed account of his progress through the edition but also a clear sense of his reliance on Gilchrist for books, contacts, and information.16 The most visible sign of Gilchrist’s help was the inclusion in the edition’s ninth volume of his biographically annotated text of Jonsonus Virbius, the volume of elegies published in 1638, the year after Jonson’s death. Gilchrist seems to have worked from a copy of the elegies lent to him by F. G. Waldron, a copy whose prospective purchase Gifford later floated.17 Gifford thanked Gilchrist in March 1814 for the recently arrived text of the elegies, ‘the notes to which are just the thing’, and suggested that Gilchrist should see 14 The note reads ‘Mr Hebers m.s. | The Gipsies Metamorphosed’. It is mistranscribed and unidentified in the facsimile edition of the manuscript (Jonson, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, ed. George Watson Cole (New York: Modern Languages Association, 1931), 98–9); nor does Cole identify the second nineteenth-century hand below Gifford’s: the note ‘Ms in Bens own hand-writing | extremely curious’, is, however, in Richard Heber’s hand. W. W. Greg’s account of the manuscript is more accurate (Jonson’s Masque of Gipsies in the Burley, Belvoir, and Windsor Versions: An Attempt at Reconstruction, ed. W. W. Greg (London: British Academy, 1952)), but does not identify the hands. A certain irony must attend on the identifications, however, since Gifford had been confident that the manuscript was Jonson’s autograph. 15 I have located two other of Gifford’s books used in preparing the edition. The first, a copy of Jonson’s Q. Horatius Flaccus, His Art of Poetrie (London: John Benson, 1640), previously owned by Alexander Pope, is now Beinecke Library, Yale, University, Z64 220; it is described by Maynard Mack, ‘A Finding List of Books Surviving from Pope’s Library’, in his ‘Collected in Himself ’: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of his Contemporaries (Newark, Del.: Delaware University Press, 1982), 394–460. The second, a composite volume containing Richard Hurd, A Letter to Mr. Mason; on the Marks of Imitation (Cambridge: W. Thurlbourn et al., 1757) and John Bowle, Reflections on Originality in Authors (London: R. Horsfield, 1766), is NAL Dyce 5090 and 1295. 16 Quotations from Gifford’s letters to Gilchrist are from their uncatalogued correspondence in the John Murray Archive (JMA), and are made with the permission of Mrs Virginia Murray and the John Murray Archive, with whom copyright resides. 17 In an undated letter, probably written after June 1815, Gifford told Gilchrist that ‘[-Whalley] Waldron I have no doubt will be glad to sell the Virbius—he is old & poor’ (JMA).

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the text before printing, ‘in case any thing occurs to you in the interim’. Gilchrist’s continuing work, through to the early summer of 1815, locks the edition into a broader network of scholarly and antiquarian communication, a pattern of sociability that shaped the edition. Gifford wrote to him on 19 June 1815: ‘The Virbius will conclude the last vol. the 9th . You have made a mistake, I see, in one writer, & have taken J.C. for Clavel instead of Cleveland. You must give therefore a few lines on him, instead of those which you have sent.’ The poem in question, now attributed to Sidney Godolphin, supplied the edition’s title-page epigraph. Gifford wrote again to Gilchrist in October, hurriedly asking for corrections (the printer, Bulmer, he explained, needed the types);18 his letter prompted Gilchrist to ask Philip Bliss in Oxford: Gifford has enjoined me to add notes to the Jonsonus Virbius, the sheets of which are now (with one exception) in my hands. I have made out something concerning all of them excepting Sam:l Howe (as I think, for I speak from memory) who was of new College. Can you give me any tidings of him? If the Virbius is before you, you will find his verses very neer the end.19

Bliss was unable to supply the assistance sought; but the subject of the letters matters: just as the elegies on Jonson’s death show him to have been socially and imaginatively part of a society and a time, so too does their nineteenth-century editing show itself to be shaped by and in its time and society. As Gifford was the first editor of Jonson to include Jonsonus Virbius alongside his Works, so was his decision an earnest of a wider commitment to relocating Jonson in the conditions and productions of his lifetime and immediately posthumous reception. The placement of Jonsonus Virbius at the close of the ninth volume, and Gifford’s placement of Godolphin’s lines on the title-page of the first, enclose Jonson’s texts and their editorial commentary within the responses of the seventeenth century: The Muses’ fairest light in no dark time; The wonder of a learned age; the line Which none can pass; the most proportion’d wit, To nature, the best judge of what was fit; The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen; The voice most echo’d by consenting men; 18 On whom, see Peter Isaac, William Bulmer: The Fine Printer in Context, 1757–1830 (London: Bain & Williams, 1993). 19 Gilchrist to Bliss, 11 Oct. 1815 (BL Add. MS 34568, fol. 45r ), misremembering Samuel Evans, author of Jonsonus Virbius, 31, ‘In Obitum ben. ionson’ (see H&S xi. 480).

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This was the first time that evidence of Jonson’s reception had been explicitly given a place in an edition of his Works. Jonson’s ‘requital’, as the poem expresses it, here anticipates that offered by Gifford through the edition: a return to the conditions of reception that obtained in the years following Jonson’s death, rather than those which had replaced them in the following century. The most recent analysis of the tributes in Virbius demonstrates clearly that the collection stands testament not only to the esteem in which Jonson was held, but to the variety of entirely pragmatic uses—political and ideological—to which writers sought to put him in the years immediately following his death. Jonsonus Virbius records the circle of Jonson’s admirers as it memorializes him: it is a social production, and its value lies not only in the poetic texts it presents, but in the evidence it offers for an understanding of how the coterie that produced those texts had been constituted.21 And, just as the Jonsonus Virbius of 1638 should be understood socially, so too does its edited appearance ask to be considered: the inclusion of the elegies, and their mediated presence on the title-page, offers itself not only as a means whereby to understand the deliberately historicizing approach of Gifford’s edition, but also offers historical scholarship today the key to its constitution. The effects of the edition’s sociability are multiple: by supplying Gifford with the materials from which to construct his apparatus, it rendered him peculiarly attentive to similar patterns in Jonson’s life and texts. The same processes whereby Gifford came into editorial possession of contextual and explanatory material are simultaneously the processes whereby, intellectually, he was able to employ the evidence of early texts and manuscripts, and whereby his edition articulated its argument: they are both the object and the medium of the edition’s knowledge. This can be seen most clearly in The Underwood and its relation to Gifford’s ‘Memoir’, where the material records of Jonsonian sociability, in all its variety, served to shape Gifford’s work as an editor.22

20 My text here is from the title-page of 1816; the poem is printed diplomatically by H&S xi. 450. 21 Andrew Lynn, ‘The Impact of Ben Jonson, 1637–1700’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2000), 11–54. 22 This is to go against Stanley Fish’s influential account of Jonson’s poetry: ‘AuthorsReaders: Jonson’s Community of the Same’, Representations, 7 (1984), 26–58.

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First published in the second volume of the posthumous 1640–1 folio of his Workes, Jonson’s Underwoods (as the collection’s running titles initially have it) or The Underwood (as the running titles become, and as the collection is now best known), has always been in some measure a difficult entity.23 Partly this is a matter of the generic diversity signalled in Jonson’s headnote: the presence of ‘works of divers nature and matter congested’, a promiscuity of elegies, epistles, and epigrams, an ‘Execration’, and (for good measure) two shrubs. But the difficulty of the collection is also a matter of the contrast between the organic metaphor of the headnote and title (‘these lesser poems of later growth’, following the earlier 1616 collection, The Forest) and the editorial attention that the works gathered in the collection have evidently received. Part of that editorial undertaking concerned the gathering for The Underwood of poems that had previously circulated in manuscript or in the prefatory matter to the books of Jonson’s friends; other poems, notably Catholic in tone or address, no less deliberately were omitted from what is in other respects a far-reaching retrospect of the poet’s career. It is possible that Jonson began to impose an initial order on this, his third collection of poems, to follow the Epigrams and The Forest, as part of the preparations for the aborted 1631 folio, which saw his plays Bartholomew Fair, The Devil is an Ass, and The Staple of News printed by John Beale before the project was abandoned by Jonson in despair at Beale’s poor workmanship. Yet, though the early ordering of the poems in The Underwood might be that of an ‘editing’ Jonson, the evidence of the collection points also to the activities of a second hand, that of Jonson’s friend and patron Sir Kenelm Digby, completing, adjusting, and in places annotating the texts after Jonson’s death in 1637.24 These difficulties of status attend also the collection as it was reprinted in Gifford’s edition of Jonson’s Works. The editing of the poetry occupied Gifford for the first six months of 1815, and his work on the ‘Biographical Memoir’ of Jonson, printed in the edition’s first volume, followed immediately after. This succession, though its effects 23 B. H. Newdigate, Times Literary Supplement, 7 Feb. 1935, p. 76, put forward arguments accepted by W. W. Greg, ‘Jonson’s Masques—Points of Editorial Principle and Practice’, Review of English Studies, 18 (1942), 144–66, at 159–60 n. 24 Richard C. Newton, ‘Making Books from Leaves: Poets Become Editors’ in Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim, eds., Print Culture and the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 246–64; Robert C. Evans, ‘Jonson, Weston, and the Digbys: Patronage Relations in Some Later Poems’, in his Jonson and the Contexts of his Time (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1994), 147–77.

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are important, was not inevitable: indeed, when Gifford sketched out a working plan in a letter to his friend Gilchrist in July 1811, he intended to follow the poetry with editions of Jonson’s commonplace book, Discoveries, and The English Grammar. Sheer haste seems the most likely reason for Gifford’s having chosen to print these two latter texts without annotation; but the decision to move directly to Jonson’s biography from his poetry brings the two final elements of the edition into close proximity, as much conceptually as chronologically. The transition also coincides with Gilchrist’s work of annotation to Jonsonus Virbius. This temporal coincidence matters: these three elements of the edition are linked by an attention to Jonsonian friendship—as if the material of the life and the poetry brought to fruition a developing understanding which had come increasingly to dominate and shape the editorial work. Why The Underwood? When Jonson’s earlier editor, Peter Whalley, came to print poems of Jonson’s that readers are now accustomed to find in the delightfully artless disarray of the Ungathered Verse, he chose to append the nine poems he had located to The Epigrams.25 Gifford thought poorly of the decision, and said so directly: the poems which Whalley had ‘foisted in’ were, he wrote, ‘absurdly inserted’; editorial intervention on this scale, he solemnly noted, ‘was injudiciously done’.26 Even by his own standards, then, Gifford’s insertion of nineteen poems in The Underwood marks something of a fault-line between editorial theory and editorial practice: the absence, perhaps, of those qualities isolated by Housman in Porson and Lachmann when he praised their ‘serious and disinterested purpose and the honesty of their dealings with themselves’.27 But to attend to the poems that Gifford planted out in The Underwood is to be made aware precisely of their congruence with the larger theme of friendship with which I am concerned, and to be made aware of the aptness of their placement. ‘Many allowances must be made for what follows,’ Gifford had advised at the start of the run of ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ that he included: ‘Few of these poems are dated, and fewer still bear titles explanatory of their subject.’28 But the titles only of the poems that Gifford inserts are immediately evocative of a society which had been newly admitted to 25

26 1756, vi. 290–304. 1816, viii. 242, 341, 242. Manilius, M. Manilii Astronomicon, ed. A. E. Housman, 5 vols. (London: Grant Richard, 1903–30), i. p. xviii. 28 1816, viii. 317. 27

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Jonson’s volume.29 Comprising the nineteen additional poems are the two on Shakespeare from the first folio (11–12 (UV 25–6)), one ‘On the Honoured Poems of his Honoured Friend, Sir John Beaumont, Baronet’ (13 (UV 32)), and another to John Fletcher (14 (UV 8)). ‘A Vision on the Muses of his Friend Michael Drayton’ (16 (UV 30))—beginning, significantly, ‘It hath been question’d, Michael, if I be | A friend at all; or, if at all, to thee’ (1–2)—is followed by two spuriously ascribed epitaphs, one for the Countess of Pembroke (15 (H&S viii. 433–4)), and another on Drayton (16 (H&S viii. 435)). These lead Gifford’s additional sequence into the dedicatory verses ‘To my Truly Beloved Friend, Master Browne: On his Pastorals’ (18 (UV 21)), the lines ‘To his Much and Worthily Admired Friend, the Author’ from Cynthia’s Revenge (19 (UV 17)), and the address ‘To My Worthy and Honoured Friend, Master George Chapman’ (20 (UV 23)). Thomas May’s translations of Lucan earn him the title of Jonson’s ‘Chosen Friend’ (21 (UV 29)); Joseph Rutter’s Shepherd’s Holiday makes him Jonson’s ‘Dear Son, and Right Learned Friend’ (22 (UV 42)). A further four short poems address themselves only to various authors (23–6 (UV 2, 20, 7, and 27)); Edward Filmer, ‘my worthy Friend’, and Richard Brome, ‘my loving friend’, are named and praised (27–8 (UV 33, 38)); and the interpolated sequence closes with ‘A Speech at Tilting’ (29 (UV 16)). Set off between the piety of the ‘Epitaph on Master Vincent Corbett’ and the lesson in enlightened Senecan patronage which comprises ‘An Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville’, the nineteen poems speak from the body of The Underwood to precisely that conception of inclusive, generous Jonsonian sociability to which Gifford many times returns. Yet we should also recognize that the poems are present only in the 1816 edition through an equivalent circle of friends. Correspondence in the British Library confirms that Gifford obtained the last poem of the inserted sequence, ‘A Speech at Tilting,’ via a transcript from Philip Bliss in Oxford;30 but he notes too that his text of the lines ‘To the Worthy Author, on The Husband’ (24), was derived from a transcript of the apparently unique copy ‘in the collection of Mr. Hill’ (1816, viii. 351). Thomas Hill was a friend of Gilchrist’s, whom Gifford had first met at the sale of Isaac Reed’s library in December 1807; he also supplied Gifford with 29 Poems in Und. are numbered by editorial convention: references that follow in the text cite Gifford’s text and numbering for each poem, followed by a cross-reference to H&S. 30 Gifford to Bliss, 16 Feb. 1815: BL Add. MS 34568, fols. 20–1; Gifford had been introduced to Bliss by Gilchrist, as the letter makes clear.

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the alternative text of Forest 10 from Love’s Martyr (viii. 269).31 Far less scrupulously, the poems which Gifford printed as Underwood 16, 18, 22, and 25 had been first claimed for Jonson in Waldron’s 1783 Sad Shepherd: shamefully, in view of the otherwise close links between the two editors, their appearance in 1816 makes no mention of their earlier printing.32 Matters of acknowledgement aside, however, the poems argue implicitly for Jonson’s wide-ranging engagement with his fellow authors on terms consistently more friendly than a whole swathe of eighteenth-century comment had allowed, even as explicitly the provenance of the material printed by Gifford serves concretely to locate his editorial practice among a society of like-minded collectors and editors. The connections between this editorial work and the biographical account of Jonson to which Gifford then turned are also illuminating. Gifford sets within his reordered Underwood a community of literary friends, a gathering of mutually admiring authors whose centre was Jonson. Taking up the terms in which Whalley had discussed Jonson’s dedicatory verses for others—‘It is true that he was sparing in his commendations of others, which probably gave occasion to accuse him of envy, and ill nature’33 —Gifford briskly refutes the charge: Jonson has been held forth to the world as the very soul of envy, jealous of all merit in others, unwilling, and, indeed, unable to bear a rival candidate for fame. But what is the fact? that in the long list of English poets, he is decidedly among the most candid and generous: the most free of his advice and assistance, the most liberal of his praise.34

And with this contention firmly motivating him in the ‘Memoir’, to which he turned on completion of the poetry, Gifford imagined a like-minded gathering, in which Jonson’s good qualities were again prominent and constitutive: the Mermaid Club, where at Raleigh’s instigation, Gifford wrote, ‘beaux esprits’ gathered. His account is reverential: Of this club, which combined more talent and genius, perhaps, than ever met together before or since, our author was a member; and here, for many years, he regularly repaired with Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Cotton, Carew, Martin, Donne, and many others, whose names, even at this distant period, call up a mingled feeling of reverence and respect. Here, in the full flow and

31

Gifford to Gilchrist, 16 Dec. 1807 (JMA); on Hill, see DNB ix. 875. F. G. Waldron, The Sad Shepherd; or, A Tale of Robin Hood, a Fragment (London: J. Nichols, 1783), 249–51. 33 34 1756, i. p. lvi. 1816, viii. 352. 32

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confidence of friendship, the lively and interesting ‘wit-combats’ took place between Shakspeare and our author.35

The coincidence of the guest list at the Mermaid and those poets invited to camp out in The Underwood is forceful. Moreover, the poems and addressees replanted in the collection grow out towards those of the party already present. They invite comparison with the more than Horatian confidence with which the Epistle to Selden opens (‘I know to whom I write; Here, I am sure, | Though I be short, I cannot be obscure’ (Und. 31, 1–2 (14)); even the reticent poem, ‘The Mind of the Frontispiece to a Book’ (Und. 42 (24)), which had appeared in Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), is caught up into the social whirl. Likewise, they ask to be read along with the four long elegies at the centre of the collection, one of which is almost certainly Donne’s, but in which Gifford chooses not to discuss exclusively, as later scholars have done, matters of attribution,36 but rather a very modern sounding ‘mutual communication’ of manuscripts, and what he calls ‘an intercommunity of verse between the two friends’ (1816, viii. 391, 364).37 If not factually negligible, then (as scholars have since shown) at least wayward, this account of the Mermaid Club is rich in imaginative investment, linking the editorial reshaping of a single collection of poems to a much broader project concerned to revalue Jonson’s career on moral and social grounds, taking its cue for such a revaluation from the very texts themselves.38 Gifford’s whimsy alerts us, that is, to the extent to which The Underwood was already a gathering of friends, already a collection which sought to recover friends and their affiliations against the dissolution of time. 35

1816, i. pp. lxv–lxvi. Evelyn Simpson, ‘Jonson and Donne: A Problem of Authorship’, Review of English Studies, 15 (1939), 274–82; and D. Heyward Brock, ‘Jonson and Donne: Structural Fingerprinting and the Attribution of Elegies 38–41’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 72 (1978), 519–27. 37 For a modern version, see Mark Bland, ‘Jonson, Biathanatos and the Interpretation of Manuscript Evidence’, Studies in Bibliography, 51 (1998), 154–82. 38 I. A. Shapiro, ‘The ‘‘Mermaid Club’’ ’, Modern Language Review, 45 (1950), 6–17, and his ‘Rejoinder’ to Percy Simpson’s ‘Answer’, Modern Language Review, 46 (1951), 58–63; see also H&S i. 257 and viii. 359–60, and Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives: New Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 214–16. Recent scholarship has underlined Shapiro’s contention that this was not predominantly a literary gathering: see Annabel Patterson, ‘All Donne’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds., Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37–67; and Tom Cain, ‘Donne and the Prince D’Amour’, John Donne Journal, 14 (1995), 83–111. 36

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Equally striking is the long series of footnotes that appear to poems at the start of volume 9 of the edition (The Underwood is divided across volumes 8 and 9). Unlike Epigrams and The Forest, poems in The Underwood are (as we have seen) numbered only by editorial convention. Francis Cunningham was the first to point out in his 1875 reprint of Gifford that the sequence of Gifford’s Underwood goes badly out as he reaches number 92: two separate poems share 92, two more share number 93, and the collection, obviously disrupted, leaps without explanation from 95 to 106. Cunningham’s explanation was that Gifford had supplied his printer Bulmer ‘with materials in the most mangled and confused condition’.39 As Cunningham also realized, however, a more immediate cause of the interruption is the presence of a ten-page note to the ‘Epigram to William, Earl of Newcastle’, containing texts which Gifford printed for the first time from BL Harley MS 4955, the longest of which, a christening entertainment at Blackfriars, represented the first substantial addition to Jonson’s works since Whalley edited The Case is Altered sixty years earlier. In a correspondence carried out via Murray’s at Albermarle Street that began on 9 November 1815, Isaac D’Israeli, who had held a reader’s ticket since at least 1798, introduced Gifford, who had not, to the then British Museum’s manuscript collections.40 Gifford learned quickly: writing to D’Israeli only a month or so later, on 22 December 1815, he was able casually to refer to ‘that m.s. vol. which I examined when I had the pleasure of meeting you at the Museum. It was numbered, as I think, 4955.’41 Here, if we are to do more than simply note Gifford’s use of a new witness to Jonson’s text, we must attend sympathetically to the conditions under which he gained access to the manuscript. D’Israeli provided Gifford at this crucial late stage of his work with another instance, alongside Bodleian MS Ashmole 38, transcripts of which had been provided by Philip Bliss, of Jonson’s social affiliations: Harley MS 4955 showed Jonson not only as a poet whose work was preserved by patrons, but as one whose work was socially occasioned, and linked into 39 The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Lieut.-Col. Francis Cunningham, 9 vols. (London: Bickers and Son, 1875), ix. 323. Two fragments of printers’ copy preserved in NAL Dyce Tall 8◦ 5342, Alexander Dyce’s set of 1816, none the less corroborate Cunningham’s estimation of Gifford’s (un)tidiness. 40 See P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973 (London: British Library, 1998); Peter Whalley had not obtained his reader’s ticket until after the publication of his edition: Arthur Sherbo, ‘Some Early Readers in the British Museum’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6 (1972), 56–64. 41 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dep. Hughenden 244/3, fols. 69r – v .

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the patterns of friendship and society which his work memorializes.42 The newness of this use of manuscript material bears underlining: when, fifteen years later, John Payne Collier was at work in the British Museum for his History of English Dramatic Poetry, he professed himself ‘astonished at the quantity of substantial materials which had remained there undetected’, not least hitherto unknown manuscripts of Jonson’s Queens and Blackness masques.43 Gifford’s handling of The Underwood is remarkable for the integrity of its effect with the means of its production: Gifford’s edition of The Underwood presents Jonson among his friends precisely because Gifford’s editorial undertaking had been enabled and shaped by his. The Underwood, a text that is itself vitally social, offers itself to an understanding of editing and publishing practice that is itself social: as published in 1641, and as republished in 1816, it contains evidence that directs a reader not only inwards towards the poems, but also outwards towards the material network of friendships, rivalries, commerce, and politics within which they took shape and within which they ask to be understood. But Gifford’s understanding of sociability allows equally for its absence or abuse; his account of Jonson’s relations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, central to the edition’s reception, turns precisely on Drummond’s perceived failure to act properly towards his one-time guest. But Gifford’s account of Drummond is itself, too, understandable only through Gifford’s own network of correspondents. The contrast between the documentary scholarship to which D’Israeli was directing Gifford and the reporting of untested anecdote which he elsewhere colourfully deprecates is here crucial: watching Gifford progress through the edition, watching him re-evaluate the bases of his knowledge, we see him rethinking his approach to the material with which he is working, coming more and more to value a Jonson who is firmly historicized, firmly linked into the patterns and structures of his own times, rather than one who, he was to argue, had been misrepresented by earlier commentators. 42 The manuscript, though not later scholars’ use of it, has been treated by Hilton Kelliher, ‘Donne, Jonson, Richard Andrews and the Newcastle Manuscript’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, 4 (1993), 134–73. 43 John Payne Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Times of Shakespeare: and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1831), i. pp. viii, 365, 371–2; Collier later edited both manuscripts in Five Court Masques: Edited from the Original MSS. of Ben Jonson, John Marston, etc. (London: Shakespeare Society, 1848).

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To turn now from D’Israeli to Walter Scott is to be made aware of the extent to which the quality and industry of his correspondents directly correlate with the factual solidity of Gifford’s edition. In June 1808, Scott had written to Gilchrist, arguing that in the Examination he had been a little too severe on Drummond who probably never intended the ‘Heads of his Conversation’ to see the light. It is odd that though his works containing doubtless these Memoranda are existing in a fair Ms in our Antiquarian Society I have never been able to keep them long enough in my hand to collate it with the printed Copy. The Key is kept by a Banker who seems to thin[k] it of as much value as that of his strong box. But I am promised admission ere long & will send Gifford the result.44

Gilchrist passed this information on to Gifford; but the long hiatus between November 1812 and March 1816 in Gifford’s correspondence with Scott put paid to this offer to examine the Drummond manuscripts, with important consequences.45 The ‘Informations’ passed by Jonson to Drummond over the winter of 1618–19 are now central to our understanding of his biography, not least providing otherwise unknown information about his ancestry and career; they are also central to our sense of Jonson’s involvement with, and judgement of, his contemporary writers, where, for all their occasionally elliptical syntax, the opinions expressed are seldom less than forthright. The text of what Jonson said to Drummond was known to Gifford, however, only in the abridged form printed in the 1711 folio of Drummond’s Works as ‘Heads of a Conversation’;46 Robert Sibbald’s fuller transcript did not surface until it was found by David Laing, who twice edited the document, first in a paper read to the Society of Antiquaries on 9 January 1832, and again ten years later for the Shakespeare Society.47 Laing’s discovery capped many years’ searches: Edmond Malone had earlier fruitlessly deputized James Boswell to ask the Secretary of the Scottish Antiquarian Society ‘to examine among his papers for the 44

Scott to Gilchrist, 9 June 1808: Letters, xii. 474. This falling off in the correspondence is partly acknowledged in Scott’s letters to Berwick (18 Jan. 1815) and John Morrit (19 Jan. 1815): Letters, iv. 11, 13. 46 The Works of William Drummond, of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: James Watson, 1711), 224–6. 47 NLS Adv. MS 33.3.19, fols. 25v –31r ; David Laing, ‘Notes by William Drummond, of Conversations with Ben Jonson at Hawthornden, in January 1619, from a Manuscript entitled ‘Informations be Ben Jonson to W.D., when he came to Scotland upon foot, 1619’, Archaeologia Scotica: Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 4 (1833), 241–70; idem, Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (London: Shakespeare Society, 1842). 45

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original Copy of the Heads of the Conversation that passed between Ben Jonson and Drummond in 1619’; Malone’s note, in his copy of the 1711 edition of Drummond’s Works, recorded of the manuscript in 1785 simply that ‘it has not been found’.48 The lack of an accurate textual basis for an account of what passed during Jonson’s time at Hawthornden was keenly felt in the period, but more particularly in Gifford’s work.49 Gifford none the less attended to the import of the additions which Robert Shiels had made to the ‘Heads’ when reprinting them in Cibber’s Lives of the Poets. Ventriloquizing Drummond, Shiels had claimed of Jonson: In short, he was in his personal character the very reverse of Shakspeare, as surly, ill-natured, proud, and disagreeable, as Shakspeare, with ten times his merit, was gentle, good-natured, easy, and amiable.50

In this interpolation—described by Gifford as ‘the scurrility of an obscure and hackney scribbler’51 —can be seen crystallized the centuries of commentary against which Gifford was reacting. But not content with discrediting the ‘testimony’ of Shiels, Gifford launched his own attack on Drummond. Following the lead offered by Gilchrist,52 Gifford describes Drummond as having ‘lured’ Jonson to Hawthornden, his record of their conversation as part of a calculated attempt to blacken his guest’s reputation. Friendship, the central structuring value of the earlier intervention in The Underwood, is not associated with Drummond except under typographical pressure: characteristic are the implied tones of ‘his ‘‘friend’’ Drummond’, displayed by quotation marks, or, at greater length, and with italics: His friend Drummond. So the commentators delight to call him on all occasions. The term is artfully chosen. It is meant to characterize the superlative infamy of Jonson, which could compel even this generous spirit, in despite of his tender regard for the poet, to blazon his vices, and bequeath them to posterity.53

48 Malone’s note is quoted from Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, PR 2260 1711 Cage Copy 2 fol. 49 Ian Donaldson, Jonson’s Walk to Scotland (Edinburgh: Quadriga, 1992), is now the best account; see also David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 254–9. 50 Theophilus Cibber, Robert Shiels, et al., The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London: R. Griffiths, 1753), i. 240–1. 51 52 1816, i. p. xli. Gilchrist, Examination, 60. 53 1816, viii. 323, i. p. lxvii.

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Yet Jonson, Gifford writes, ‘cherished’ his friendship with Drummond, oblivious of the unmotivated harm which his host wished upon him; very depraved must have been the mind, that could witness such effusions of tenderness with a determination to watch the softest moment, and betray the confidence of his guest. For this perfidious purpose no one ever afforded greater facilities than Jonson. He wore his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at: a bird of prey, therefore, like Drummond, had a noble quarry before him; and he could strike at it without stooping. . . . He only sought to injure the man whom he had decoyed under his roof; and he therefore gave his remarks in rude and naked deformity.54

There is an odd effect of voice here: for all the solidarity implied by his defence, Gifford’s allusion is to Iago’s self-description: ‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve | For daws to peck at. I am not what I am’ (i. i. 65–6). Notwithstanding this unsettling moment, Gifford sets about the use made of the Conversations by the Biographia Britannica, Shiels, and Alexander Chalmers. Only William Rufus Chetwood, who in his brief 1756 biography of Jonson had written that the Conversations showed ‘as the Malice and Envy of a bad Heart’, is spared from the opprobrium.55 Gifford’s friends were quicker to respond to the edition than the public prints, some of whose reactions I discussed in the previous chapter. Waldron’s delight on receiving his set was recalled by John Taylor in his posthumously published Records of My Life: I met Mr. Waldron on the publication of Mr. Gifford’s edition of ‘Ben Jonson,’ carrying the nine bulky volumes home through the park, so delighted with having had them presented to him by Mr. Gifford, as if he thought they could not be safe in any hands but his own. Mr. Gifford presented them to me at the same time, but, however proud I was of the gift, I ventured to send them home by a deputy.56

Books here are in the business (bulkily) of mediating and recording friendship. Gilchrist’s large-paper set of the edition was quickly conveyed to Stamford. John Philip Kemble’s library contained a Russia-bound set, in view of its binding and Kemble’s association with the edition, possibly 54

1816, i. p. cxvii. William Rufus Chetwood, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Ben. Jonson, Esq (Dublin: the author, 1756), 55; 1816, i. p. cxxx. The parts played in this episode by Shiels and Chetwood are discussed in Arthur Freeman, ‘The Beginnings of Shakespearean (and Jonsonian) Forgery: Attribution and the Politics of Exposure’, The Library, 7th ser., 5 (2004), 265–93, 402–27. 56 John Taylor, Records of My Life, 2 vols. (London: Edward Bull, 1832), ii. 87. 55

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a presentation copy.57 Heber had a set; he later purchased James Boswell the younger’s annotated copy.58 Through the autumn and winter of 1816 Scott angled for John Ballantyne to send him a large-paper set, which, once received, he read through: Gifford wrote on 11 September 1817 to thank him for his observations—the substance of which cannot now be guessed at—and to assure him that any ‘further communications’ would be ‘noted down in my copy with the utmost care’, against what seemed to him (in view of his age and health) the then unlikely prospect of a second edition.59 It was, though, a project to which Gifford returned later, at the end of his life, in his continued correspondence with Isaac D’Israeli in 1826: ‘I shall reprint the Life of Ben for my private use. Have you any thing to add to your former tokens of kindness—which I cherish exceedingly’.60 No such reprint survives. Others not involved in the preparation of the edition interested themselves in acquiring and reading it. Hester Lynch Piozzi recorded on 11 December 1816 that her bookseller Collins had brought her, in addition to a nineteen-volume edition of Richardson, ‘Ben: Jonson’s Works by Gifford’, a set which, though it ‘filled’ her ‘Book-Shelves’, was not referred to again in her correspondence. None the less, when the Works were sold in September 1823, the catalogue referred to its bearing ‘MS. notes’.61 Given the ferocity of Gifford’s attack on Piozzi among the Della Cruscans, the disappearance of her set is to be lamented.62 Ludwig Tieck’s interest

57 A Catalogue of the Valuable and Extensive Miscellaneous Library . . . of John Philip Kemble (London: Evans, 1821), lot 692; in the year after publication Gifford attended the party celebrating Kemble’s retirement from the stage: [Anon.], An Authentic Narrative of Mr. Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage (London: John Miller, 1817), 48. 58 Heber’s set was lot 3314 in Bibliotheca Heberiana, P. vii (London: Evans, 1835); Boswell’s set was lot 3634 in P. i (London: Sotheby, 1834), having earlier been lot 1501 in Bibliotheca Boswelliana (London: Sotheby, 1825). 59 Gifford to Scott, Letters, i. 512–13; Waller Scott, Catalogue of the Library at Abbotsford, ed. by G. H. Gordon and J. G. Cochrane (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1838), 209; NLS MS 866, fol. 149r . 60 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dep. Hughenden, 244/3, fols. 79–80. 61 The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–1821, ed. Edward A. Bloom, Lillian D. Bloom, et al., 5 vols. (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1989–99), v. 554; Collectanea Johnsoniana (1823), lot 148, cited from Sale Catalogues of the Libraries of Samuel Johnson, Hester Lynch Thrale (Mrs. Piozzi) and James Boswell, ed. Donald D. Eddy (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Books, 1993), 139–212. 62 On Piozzi as annotator, see Morris R. Brownell, ‘Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Marginalia’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 3 (1977), 97–100; and H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 102–12; Gifford’s Della Cruscan satires are reprinted and contextualized in John Strachan, gen. ed. and ed., British Satire, 1785–1840, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), iv.

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is easier to quantify. Having in 1816 already transcribed and commented upon substantial extracts from Gifford’s annotation in the margins of his copy of the Jonson third folio (now BL C.61.f.1), Tieck bought a set of Gifford’s edition in the following year (now BL C.182.a.1) and proceeded to read through the works again, adding further marginalia.63 This work of annotation, comment, and disagreement is recalled (though without mention of Gifford) in Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary entry of 29 June 1817, when he recorded Tieck’s opinions: ‘Of Ben Jonson he thinks highly. The pieces he distinguished were ‘‘Bartholomew Fair’’ (perhaps his best piece), ‘‘The Devil is an Ass,’’ ‘‘The Alchymist,’’ ‘‘The Fox,’’ ‘‘The Silent Woman,’’ &c.’64 But it was Gifford’s treatment of Drummond that polarized public responses to the edition. The ‘Vindication of Drummond of Hawthornden, Against the Attack of Mr Gifford in his Edition of Ben Jonson,’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (February 1818) refuted Gifford’s ‘groundless and malicious’ charges, turning the asperity he had directed at Drummond back upon the editor: ‘all Mr Gifford’s talk about decoying, and enveigling, and betraying, and sacrificing of Jonson, is a foolish libel’. Accepting that Jonson had been unfairly treated, the reviewer nevertheless found Gifford’s language ‘very like that of insanity’.65 In August 1818, The British Critic questioned the ‘propriety’ and the presentation of the charges laid against Drummond (‘These are hard words, and overshoot their purpose’), but endorsed Gifford’s refutation of ‘the numerous accusations . . . heaped upon the unoffending bard’.66 Blackwood’s returned to Drummond’s cause in February 1819, offering with the benefit of ‘Time’s Magic Lantern’, a dramatized conversation between Jonson and his host. The ‘Dialogue’ would be merely risible were it not for the context in which it asked to be read: a pseudo-dramatic rendering of the

63 Tieck’s annotations are transcribed and discussed by Elisabeth Neu, ‘Tieck’s Marginalia on the Elizabethan Drama: The Holdings in the British Library’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1987). 64 Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3rd corr. edn., 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1872), i. 298. Crabb Robinson reordered Tieck’s praise in his manuscript Reminiscences: see Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., Being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1922), 73. 65 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 2 (1818), 497–501. Gifford certainly read this review: he told Scott that ‘the remarks . . . disappointed me; for I expected to find some additional information, and was vexed to find that the writer knew no more than myself ’ (30 Apr. 1818: NLS MS 3889, fol. 80v ). 66 The British Critic, ns 10 (1818), 183–99.

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Conversations could not but be involved in further vindicating the reputation of at least one of the participants. And Blackwood’s Drummond, if nothing else, is certainly courteous: eager and willing to ‘bend the knee to the laureate; the king of scholars and bards’, ever ready to supply his thirsty guest with ‘a fresh bottle’ of his ‘favourite old wine’, and delicate in formulating his departures from Jonson’s judgements on men and poetry, no character could be further from the surly and envious Scot of Gifford’s portrayal.67 During the years following the publication of Gifford’s edition, William Hazlitt was working out a related response to Jonson and his editor: Drummond figures less in his responses than in those of Blackwood’s and The British Critic, but their concern with sociability—the relationship of Jonson to his own present, and to subsequent understandings of those relationships—is again evident. Hazlitt’s is the most remarkable of the responses to Gifford’s edition, one which powerfully mobilizes Jonson across the political divides of the age. As I now move away from the making of the edition to its reception, I concentrate on a sixteen-month period between November 1818 and February 1820 in which Jonson and Gifford were present to Hazlitt’s mind and attention. I offer a reading of Jonson’s Sejanus which, though it seeks to be historically and politically grounded in the claims it makes for Hazlitt’s engagement with the play, also alerts us to the play’s continued proleptic capacity to bear forcefully on later events. Hazlitt’s response to the edition reveals the extent to which the conditions of Jonson’s reception were in the early nineteenth century latently political, and the circles in which Jonson and one group of his readers moved Tory by alignment. Hazlitt thus takes Jonson, and with him his readers, into an explicitly politicized Romanticism.

II Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’ was delivered at the Surrey Institution on 10 November 1818, part of the series he published in March 1819 as Lectures on the English Comic Writers.68 The printed text of the lecture draws an extended comparison between the humour of Shakespeare and that of Jonson, a comparison that 67 68

1819).

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 23 (1819), 558–60. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Taylor & Hessey,

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is resolved unquestionably in favour of Shakespeare. Though Hazlitt expresses reservations concerning Shakespeare’s comic practice—his ‘comic Muse’, he writes, ‘is too good-natured and magnanimous’—it is held to participate in and to extend a community of fellow-feeling, in which a vision, ‘social and humane’, predominates (v. 30).69 Hazlitt describes Shakespearean comedy as ‘deficient’—not, he adds, because of a ‘wish to give a preference of any comedies over his’, but because comedy itself is not ‘an affair of the heart or the imagination’, the great subjects (so it is claimed) of Shakespeare’s writings. This deficiency is attributed to the non-urban nature of Shakespeare’s comedy, a predominance, by location and inclination, of the country that is felt in the absence of the ‘artificial models and regulated mass of fashionable absurdity or elegance’ which a city would have supplied to work upon and work into his art (v. 33). Yet the ‘natural genius’ of Shakespeare still outweighs his faults: he becomes the standard of a complete achievement against which the partial works of Jonson are measured and found wanting (v. 33). In a devastating series of weighted parallels, Jonson’s writing repeatedly fails to balance out Shakespeare’s positive qualities: where Jonson, ‘a great borrower from the works of others, and a plagiarist even from nature’, is constrained and cramped in imitation, his works reading ‘like translations’, Shakespeare borrows ‘with a spirit, felicity, and mastery over his subject’, demonstrating an ‘independence of mind’ and originality of thought even when plundering ‘whole passages from books’; Jonson’s style is said to be ‘as dry, as literal, and meagre, as Shakspeare’s is exuberant, liberal, and unrestrained’ (v. 33). Shakespeare’s characters offer a mode of natural (and naturalistic) achievement to which Jonson can merely aspire by fabrication: where ‘Shakspeare’s characters are men’, Hazlitt writes, Jonson’s ‘are more like machines, governed by mere routine’ (v. 34). Hazlitt rarely finds words of unreserved praise, and more often simply of distaste: Volpone, ‘prolix and improbable, but intense and powerful’, is held to be Jonson’s ‘best play’; Every Man In his Humour, it is grudgingly conceded, ‘acts better than it reads’; Bartholomew Fair is described as ‘chiefly remarkable for the exhibition of odd humours and tumblers’ tricks, and is on that account amusing to read once’; while The Alchemist ‘contains all that is quaint, dreary, obsolete, and hopeless in 69 Quotations from Hazlitt, unless otherwise noted, follow The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), and are given by volume and page number in the text.

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this once-famed art’ (v. 38–9). In Keats’s phrase for Hazlitt’s demolition of Crabbe in an earlier lecture, Jonson finds himself on the receiving end of ‘an unmerciful licking’.70 Yet the texture of Hazlitt’s prose is as worthy of attention as his conclusions regarding Jonson might seem premature. Of Shakespeare, Hazlitt writes, His humour (so to speak) bubbles, sparkles, and finds its way in all directions, like a natural spring. In Ben Jonson it is, as it were, confined in a leaden cistern, where it stagnates and corrupts; or directed only through certain artificial pipes and conduits, to answer a given purpose. The comedy of this author is far from being ‘lively, audible, and full of vent:’ it is for the most part obtuse, obscure, forced, and tedious. (v. 34)

Before Hazlitt’s embedded quotation from Coriolanus, the source of his figure of the spring and the fountain repays attention. Later in the lecture, Hazlitt quotes from a letter of James Howell to Sir Thomas Hawkins in which, following an evening spent listening to Jonson ‘vapour extremely of himself, and . . . vilifying others, to magnify his own Muse’, Howell commented: ‘Proprio laus sordet in ore: be a man’s breath ever so sweet, yet it makes one’s praise stink, if he makes his own mouth the conduit-pipe of it’ (v. 36). The associative links between the phrases work not only at the level of shared diction, Hazlitt’s ‘pipes and conduits’ reversing Howell’s ‘conduit-pipe’, but more importantly at a level of implicit connectedness, whereby Hazlitt’s ‘stagnates and corrupts’ develops Howell’s blunter ‘stink’. Such a prose pattern of embedded sympathy, where the thoughts and stylistic habits of one writer bear on and shape another, is evident also in Hazlitt’s quotation from Coriolanus, though the effect of such sympathy is here more difficult to sound. Hazlitt’s prose adopts the bellicose tones of Shakespeare’s servingman, grumbling in favour of conflict: ‘Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night. It’s sprightly walking, audible and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible’ (iv. v. 226–9). What Hazlitt’s memory confuses, the shape of his prose respects: though his quotation is characteristically inexact (his substituted ‘lively’ saps the imagined life from the ‘sprightly walking’ personification), his prose here shares with Shakespeare’s not only a contrastive mode of argument, but the knelling toll of four deadening adjectives with which the movement 70 To George and Tom Keats, ?14 Feb. 1818: The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 227.

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of thought is rounded out. His quotation demonstrates precisely that unruly, ungoverned sparkle so praised in Shakespeare. Hazlitt’s prose absorbs and is permeated by his reading; his critical judgements take their impulse not merely from thought but from the subtler cues of phrase and figure. When Hazlitt comes to discuss Sejanus, such intimate shapings are of prime importance. That it should have been Coriolanus to which Hazlitt turned is itself not without consequence. Hazlitt’s discussion of the play’s politics in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays,71 and particularly his suggestion that ‘Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question’ (i. 215), infuriated the Quarterly Review, which rallied in Shakespeare’s presumed defence: In his remarks upon Coriolanus, which contain the concentrated venom of his malignity, he has libelled our great poet as a friend of arbitrary power, in order that he may introduce an invective against human nature . . . Shall we not be dishonouring the gentle Shakspeare by answering such calumny, when every page of his works supplies its refutation?72

Hazlitt believed that this review had been written by Gifford, the Quarterly’s editor: the belief, since there is much of Gifford’s characteristically impatient abruptness of tone in the review, is not insupportable. Yet the review was not his: though Hazlitt’s grounds, stylistic and political, for believing Gifford to have been its author appear sound, the review had in fact been written by John Russell. Gifford may have revised Russell’s draft; certainly Hazlitt throughout his writings treated the review as Gifford’s; and to the extent that it crucially shaped his thinking, the precise matter of attribution matters less than the conclusions that Hazlitt drew from it. Indeed, that the Quarterly singled out the essay on Coriolanus as central to Hazlitt’s concerns in Characters is, as Jonathan Bate has argued, to its credit;73 but the full implications of this controversy for Jonson have not been fully explored: indeed, Jonson’s bearing on the controversy has never yet been canvassed. All the same, the repercussions of the exchange between Hazlitt, Gifford, and his avatars should interest us, for the politicized ground on which the 71

William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (London: R. Hunter et al., 1817). Quarterly Review, 18 (1818), 458–66. 73 Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 168–73; see further, Charles Mahoney, ‘Upstaging the Fall: Coriolanus and the Spectacle of Romantic Apostasy’, Studies in Romanticism, 38 (1999), 29–50. 72

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dispute took place was closely linked to that on which Hazlitt chose to engage Jonson. Hazlitt does not mention Gifford in the printed text of ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’ in Lectures on the English Comic Writers, but Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary entry for 10 November 1818 alerts us to the differences between the lecture’s spoken and printed shape: I hurried to the Surrey Institution to hear Hazlitt’s second lecture on the Comic Writers of England. Shakespeare was part of the subject, but the lecture was not one of the best; it was but a dull performance. He raised a tumult by abusing Gifford, which a few hissed at and many applauded; but the best thing he did was reading a glorious passage from Ben Jonson’s Alchemist in which the Alchemist riots in imagination on the wealth he is about to enjoy.74

Checking the diary entry against the printed text of the lecture suggests that Crabb Robinson mistook Mammon for Subtle in ii. i of The Alchemist, but that his recollection of the ‘glorious passage’ keeps very close to the printed text of Hazlitt’s lecture, which introduces the extract as a ‘glorious scene’ (v. 39); and though Crabb Robinson is regrettably reticent as to the precise nature of the abuse he recalled, traces elsewhere offer clues as to the form it took. Two days after the lecture was delivered, 12 November 1818, The Times carried a letter to its editor signed by ‘a friend to order’: The subject on which I now trouble you is not of any public importance; but the knowledge of your zeal in checking any innovation or propriety induces me to address you. I am in the habit of attending the lectures at the Surrey Institution, and on Tuesday last was present at one delivered by Mr. Hazlitt, on the comic genius of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, &c.; in the course of which he made (as he not unfrequently does) an unfortunate and irrelevant political allusion; which was instantly followed by rounds of applause from some, and hissing from other parts of the audience; by which hubbub the course of the lecture was suspended for some minutes.

The correspondent demurs at Hazlitt’s violation of ‘the impartiality to be expected from a lecture on criticism’, describes himself as ‘very little moved by party differences’, and closes with a last condemnation of such behaviour, ‘totally at variance with the dignity and decorum due to the place and occasion’.75 74 Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1938), i. 225. 75 The Times, 12 Nov. 1818.

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What is most immediately striking about this letter is the authentically Jonsonian note struck in its opening sentence. Compare Jonson’s ‘An Epistle to Master John Selden’: What blots and errors have you watch’d and purg’d Records and authors of ! how rectified Times, manners, customs! innovations spied!76

More important, however, is the friend’s explicit attempt to separate politics from criticism, a separation that is not only discursive but spatial: ‘whatever a lecturer’s private political notions may be, he is wrong in venting them before a mixed auditory’. The two linked distinctions—between politics and poetry, and public and private space—offer not only an index of the assumptions underwriting the friend’s intervention in the debate, but a further link back to what it was that Hazlitt actually said to raise such a tumult. By the weekend, 15 November 1818, Leigh and John Hunt’s Examiner made clear exactly what was at stake: on facing pages it carried a one-paragraph notice of the lecture and a longer piece headed ‘Mr. Hazlitt and the Times’ Correspondent’, the latter quoting the 12 November letter in full.77 The Examiner’s notice of the lecture accepts as orthodoxy the comparative move by which Hazlitt had diminished Jonson, agreeing that though Shakespeare and Jonson were ‘both eminent and excellent’, they were ‘no more to be looked upon as rivals, than number 10 is to be looked upon as the rival of number 10,000’. It also records the substance of Hazlitt’s offence against propriety: Mr. hazlitt noticed, in a strain of just contempt, the special nonsense of a living Editor (Mr. gifford), who in his anxiety to claim a more courteous character for ben jonson than the honest old poet would have asked for himself, sets about shewing his taste for benevolence by venting his peevishness and petty egotism upon every writer on the subject whom he meets,—with ‘impatient beggings of the question, and pert ejaculations of surprise.’78

The ‘special nonsense’ was more clearly and lengthily defined in the second article: Mr. Hazlitt, in treating of Ben Jonson’s dramatic writings, glanced at a querulous edition of his works by Mr. Gifford, ‘recommended by an apostrophe 76

Und. 14 (H&S viii. 158); text from 1816, viii. 366. Neither Stanley Jones, ‘Hazlitt as Lecturer: Three Unnoticed Contemporary Accounts’, ´ Etudes anglaises, 15 (1962), 15–24, nor Wu (v. 390) note that the letter was reprinted in The Examiner. 78 The Examiner, 15 Nov. 1818, p. 726. 77

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to Dr. Ireland’s posthumous fame, and a dedication to Mr. Canning’s public principles.’ Now, if the very mention of Mr. Canning’s public principles is a piece of severe irony, which his friends cannot brook, this is not Mr. Hazlitt’s fault. If an allusion to this Gentleman’s public principles is an irrelevant mixing up of party politics with general literature, the impropriety is Mr. Gifford’s, who in his Dedication of that work expressly sanctions and makes himself responsible for Mr. Canning’s ‘public principles.’ Mr. Hazlitt did not go out of his way to attack Mr. Gifford; he merely stood (we think unnecessarily) on the defensive. The Correspondent of the Times can never have heard of the Quarterly Review, and its impartiality, which parallels even that of the Times. The Editor of that Review has published more than one article in it, for the avowed purpose of crushing Mr. Hazlitt as a writer, on the score of his political sentiments, by false facts and false representations, and concludes one of these tirades in particular with a declaration, that ‘he should not have undertaken it but to shew how small a portion of talent and attainment is necessary to carry on the trade of sedition!’—that is, to write the Characters of Shakspeare’s Plays. After this, it must seem a little hard to preclude Mr. Hazlitt, on the ground of liberality and candour, from even a passing allusion to those connections and ‘public principles’ of Mr. Gifford’s, which constantly influence his critical opinions, and alone give authority to them.79

The alacrity with which Hunt takes up and extends the distinctions articulated by The Times’ correspondent ought to give us pause; that the debate is at this stage couched in something approaching the language of social etiquette—propriety, dignity, decorum—ought not to divert attention from its political base. Gifford’s dedicatory practice demands that we understand his edition of the Works not as a neutral, literary presentation of the text but as a deeply politicized production, in which Jonson and Jonson’s very techniques are caught up, and become the site on which competing political projects clash. Among the first dramatists to dedicate the printed texts of plays, Jonson recognized that a text’s dedication could be a powerful political manœuvre, a richly packed strategy both for aligning his work and for constructing ways in which it might be read.80 The dedication to Canning, newly appointed president of the Board of 79 Ibid. 727. ‘Dr. Ireland’s posthumous fame’ looks to Gifford’s account of his friendship with John Ireland, then dean of Westminster (1816, i. pp. ccxlvii–ccxlviii); the later quotation varies Gifford’s contention ‘that it might not be unprofitable to show how very small a portion of talent and literature was necessary for carrying on the trade of sedition’ (Quarterly Review, 18 (1818), 466). 80 Joseph Loewenstein, ‘The Script in the Marketplace’, Representations, 12 (1985), 101–14; Martin Butler, ‘Jonson’s Folio and the Poetics of Patronage’, Criticism, 35 (1993), 377–90.

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Control for India, is dated 3 July 1816, and offers the work ‘in testimony | of the sincerest admiration of his transcendent talents, | of the highest respect for his public virtues, | and in | grateful acknowledgment | of the friendship with which, for a long | series of years, he has honoured the | editor’ (i. n.p).81 Away from his very public lapidary capitals, Gifford’s long private and hitherto unpublished correspondence with Canning gives ample evidence for the genuineness of the tribute paid here. First associated through The Anti-Jacobin, Gifford had as early as January 1802 praised Canning’s ‘extraordinary talents for public life’, and written of ‘a wish to see them highly as well as honourably employed’.82 Ten years later, he paid an even more eloquent tribute to his friend and patron: ‘You are now the mark for all the admirers of Mr Pitt, and if it could ever be truly said spes altera, it is at this moment.’83 The tribute is fully weighted by an earlier declaration to Canning: ‘I owe Mr Pitt all I possess.’84 Gifford’s dedication explicitly associates Jonson with a mode of Tory politics and society which the attack in The Examiner acutely focuses. The boundaries of the public and private spheres, and the praise of Canning’s eminence, conventionally if fulsomely rehearsed by Gifford’s dedication, are charged and contested by Hazlitt’s public attention to the relationship between the editor and the politician, the theatre and the House. Having himself been attacked by Gifford for an antipathetic political criticism, he returns the charge upon the self-effacing, naturalized politics of Gifford’s editing. However, the terms in which Hazlitt later discussed Gifford and Canning in The Spirit of the Age create them not only as political but as stylistic allies through a habit of associative description which repeatedly stresses connections of thought and phrase.85 This habit of

81 Canning had been ambassador to Lisbon from Nov. 1814; appointed president of the India Board in March 1816, he returned to England in May: Wendy Hinde, George Canning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 270–8. 82 Gifford to Canning, 19 Jan. 1802: WYAS, Leeds, GC/66a (uncatalogued letters, Gifford to Canning, 1800–1824); this and subsequent quotations are reproduced by the kind permission of the Earl and Countess of Harewood and Trustees of the Harewood House Trust. 83 Gifford to Canning, 24 Oct. 1812: WYAS, GC/66a. 84 Gifford to Canning, 25 Oct. 1802: WYAS, GC/66a. 85 The two-volume Galignani edition of The Spirit of the Age (Paris, 1825) printed the portrait of Canning in its second volume; it was not part of the first or second London editions (both dated 1825, though the latter was published in 1826); the third London edition (1858) added the portrait of Canning to the text of the second edition (Wu, vii. pp. xxi–xxiii, 237, 257).

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prose is characteristic of both Hazlitt’s thought and style.86 Moreover, the terms in which Hazlitt discussed Jonson are intimately related to those in which he discussed his editor: the lexicon which Hazlitt applies to Jonson shares vital key words with that in which he writes of Gifford and his political associates. Gifford, ‘originally bred to some handicraft’, understood merely, by Hazlitt’s account, ‘the mechanical and instrumental part of learning’ and judged writing ‘by technical rules’; rotating the descriptions, Hazlitt later suggested that Gifford was inclined ‘to the technical in style’ and to ‘a subjection of individual feeling to mechanic rules’ (vii. 180, 182). Quoting Gifford’s pedestrian poetry cruelly alongside Keats, Hazlitt remarks upon ‘the low, mechanic vein’ of the ‘impoverished lines’, so at odds with their author’s ‘self-conceit and self-importance’; Gifford’s ‘political subserviency’ is said to complete ‘his ridiculous pedantry and vanity’ (vii. 188, 180, 181). The descriptions of Canning, and particularly his oratory, immediately partake of the same pool of associated diction. Canning’s speeches are mocked for their ‘scholastic pedantry’; their speciously stylish achievements are said to be not the product of eloquence but to have been laboriously worked up secondhand from ‘commonplaces, elegant, but somewhat tarnished’, ‘mechanic helps to style and technical flourishes’. Such stylistic traits are an index of the man: they are the ‘trappings of upstart self-importance’ (vii. 240). The series of collocations reveals the habits of association that inform and shape Hazlitt’s prose; but it is important also for the terms in which Hazlitt came to think of Jonson. Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, alleged that Gifford complacently assumed ‘that Tory writers are classical and courtly as a matter of course’ (vii. 180), and to read his descriptions of Jonson in the light of this association is to see how he read Gifford’s Jonson as a Tory avant la lettre. We might remember Hazlitt’s account of Jonson’s characters, not men but ‘more like machines’, as the phrase from ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’ had it (v. 34); relevant too is the devastating definition of Jonsonian comedy which Hazlitt supplied: ‘It is cross-grained, mean, and mechanical. It is handicraft wit’ (v. 35).87 Jonson’s ‘scholastic’ turn of mind, the repose of his poetry ‘in the 86 As has been argued by Stanley Jones, ‘Three Additions to the Canon of Hazlitt’s Political Writings’, Review of English Studies, ns 38 (1987), 355–63. 87 The association might have been suggested by Schlegel’s discussion of Jonson in A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature: ‘Ben Jonson, who in all his pieces took a mechanical view of art, bore a farther resemblance to the master of a handicraft in taking an

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pedantic and far-fetched’, and ‘his overweening admiration of his own works’ all find their parallels in the descriptions of Canning and Gifford (v. 35). The exactitude with which Hazlitt, by such rhetorical strategies, positions and aligns Jonson, Gifford, and Canning has not, I believe, been fully appreciated; nor has the richness of this nexus of association been explored for the light it sheds upon Hazlitt’s criticisms of Jonson. The point is important: Ian Donaldson has valuably suggested that Hazlitt, and critics following him, appear to have disliked Jonson ‘partly at least because they could not abide his editor’.88 Yet I think that this elegant formulation only partly accounts for the energies at play in Hazlitt’s work here; indeed, the terms in which Hazlitt articulates his dislike both of Jonson and of Gifford might allow us to reverse Donaldson’s ordering: rather, we might argue, only through the process of working out his dislike for Jonson was Hazlitt able to formulate his distaste for Gifford; and, we might further argue, the techniques he learned from Jonson, and his close indebtedness to his work, are a crucial frame for his assault. To the work in which this dislike was most extensively exercised, A Letter to William Gifford, Esq., and the unnoticed but vitally important relationship between this attack and the treatment of Sejanus in Hazlitt’s Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, I now turn. Throughout the eighteenth century, Jonson’s Sejanus, as adapted for the theatre or discussed in popular lectures, was repeatedly offered as a lesson in political corruption. Francis Gentleman’s adaptation of 1752 described Sejanus ‘as an Example to Futurity, of that Justice which will at one Time or other overtake the Great bad Man who uses his Power to oppress, or to curtail the Liberties of his Country’.89 The play, his verse Prologue contended, still spoke powerfully to a situation, relevant in Jonson’s time as in his own, when Vice corrupts and cankers in a State . . . When plodding Ministers by wicked Arts, Can blind the Eyes, and rule a People’s Hearts.90 apprentice’ (trans. John Black, 2 vols. (London: Baldwin et al., 1815), ii. 291). Hazlitt wrote a long notice of Schlegel’s Lectures for The Edinburgh Review, 26 (Feb. 1816), 67–107, repr. by Wu, i. 271–306. 88 Ian Donaldson, ‘Jonson and the Tother Youth’, in his Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 6–25. 89 Francis Gentleman, Sejanus, A Tragedy (London: R. Manby and H. S. Cox, 1752), pp. xi–xii (italic/roman reversed). 90 Ibid. p. xiv.

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In 1770, an anonymous adaptation used its heavily ironic dedication to the earl of Bute to counsel him against the dangers attendant on favouritism, and the perils incident upon ‘many other ill-fated monopolizers of royal favour’: a picture of Sejanus was offered to him, ‘there being such an amazing disparity, as must confirm the glorious character you at present possess’.91 In April 1795, John Thelwall, during a lecture on ‘The Political Prostitution of our Public Theatres’, argued—in terms that have clear links to those later employed by Hazlitt—that Jonson’s tragedy ‘paints the daring ambition of the worst of men, the most deceitful and treacherous of ministers, wading through the blood of thousands to the attainment of uncontrollable authority’, and ‘the contemptible arts of the slaves and panders of power’.92 Such accounts allow that Jonson’s play might be politically radical, even in its classicism. The radicalism of Jonson’s Sejanus troubled Gifford, not so much politically—no play, of any time, ‘abounds so much in moral and political maxims of high import’, he wrote (iii. 157)—as dramatically.93 Though his endnote to the play pronounced it to have been ‘much too lightly estimated’, and resoundingly echoed Jonson’s own assertion that ‘in fulness and frequency of sentence, he ha[d] discharged the offices of a tragic writer’ (iii. 157), a tone of exasperation marked his introductory remarks on the play’s construction: ‘Sejanus is not divided into scenes in any of the editions; it has neither exits nor entrances; and is, upon the whole, the most involved and puzzling drama, in its internal arrangements, that ever was produced’ (iii. 3). Though he went about expanding stage business and marking scene divisions, Gifford harboured more lingering doubts concerning the play’s conclusion. The play ends when Macro, the ‘instrument’ of Tiberius’s covert actions against Sejanus, ‘hath him suspected, accused, condemned, and torn in pieces by the rage of the people’ (‘The Argument’: iii. 11). Macro’s triumphant entry into the Senate is the climax of Act v: Mac. Now, great Sejanus, you that awed the state, And sought to bring the nobles to your whip . . . And would have pyramids, yea temples, rear’d To your huge greatness; now you lie as flat, 91 [Anon.], The Favourite, An Historical Tragedy (London: John Bell et al., 1770), pp. ii–iii. 92 John Thelwall, The Tribune, 3 vols. (London: the author, 1795–6), iii. 301–3. 93 Quotations from Sejanus and Gifford’s apparatus to the play follow 1816 by volume and page number, and are given in the text; the second reference, if present, is to H&S, by act and line number.

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Macro’s entry stirred Gifford, as within the play it excites the senators; but it also prompted him to speculation. Gifford’s note to the passage reads: ‘Here, perhaps, this tragedy originally ended; and here, indeed, is its proper close. What follows is merely tedious, and has more the appearance of a closet exercise, than a dramatic exhibition. All that has passed since the exit of Sejanus, is of uncommon spirit and beauty’ (iii. 150). The same moment returned to trouble Gifford when writing the ‘Memoir’ of Jonson that occupies most of the edition’s first volume; in offering a critical estimation of the play, he worried over its ‘protracted conclusion’, remarking: ‘Undoubtedly the curtain should have dropped before the entrance of Terentius’, four lines after the passage quoted above (i. p. ccxxi). This judgement reinforces that which he had passed in the endnote to the play: had the play ‘concluded, as it ought’, he wrote, ‘it might have been securely paralleled for spirit and effect with the catastrophe of many of our most celebrated pieces’ (iii. 157). For a reader of the play in its quarto or folio texts (1605 and 1616), the stage business following the senators’ chorused praise would have looked rather different from that prescribed by Gifford. Matters of pointing aside, both early texts offer the (neo-)classical direction ‘arruntivs. lepidvs. terentivs.’, bringing the new character, Terentius, on to the stage to hear Arruntius’s comments.94 Gifford, however, chose to leave Arruntius and Lepidus alone on-stage for three-and-a-half lines following a general exeunt, giving them a dramatically weighted moment together before the

94 Thus Q; F, preserving the order of entry, replaces points with commas. On Q’s Latinate pointing see Sejanus, ed. Philip J. Ayres (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 5.

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entry of Terentius; in this he is followed by most modern editors. The lines isolated by Gifford are vital to the play: Arruntius’s foresight questions and probes the imperial sureties of the Senators’ rejoicing. The speech injects a corrosive recognition of realpolitik that blisters the composed surface of the moment. Gifford’s doubt over the moment of Terentius’s entry—he seems to remember the Q/F direction in the ‘Memoir’, but describes his own emendation in the note to the play-text—seems itself to have been provoked by the brilliantly unsettling effect of Arruntius’s lines. Moreover, as Arruntius launches the key term ‘flattery’ into the play’s closing moments, the editorial dubiety serves to highlight the figure of Macro to whom it had been applied. I think this hesitation, in the play and in Gifford’s commentary, would not have been lost on Hazlitt; indeed, in drawing the focus of the drama so tightly on Macro, it provided him with a rich vein of material that he turned against Gifford in A Letter. Summoned to his first meeting with Tiberius in Act iii, Macro is left alone on-stage, musing on the as yet ambiguous function he will serve: I will not ask, why Cæsar bids do this; But joy, that he bids me. It is the bliss Of courts, to be employ’d, no matter how; A prince’s power makes all his actions virtue. We, whom he works by, are dumb instruments, To do, but not enquire: his great intents Are to be served, not search’d. (iii. 90 (iii, 714–20))

Employment and its cognates hold powerful attraction for Macro, as, more equivocally, they seem also to have done for Jonson at this period.95 Alone again on-stage at the start of Gifford’s iv. ii, Macro returns to turn over his ‘employment’ (iii. 95 (iv, 85)); and through him Sejanus urges employment towards the vacuum of amoral activity, given retrospective sanction, urged by Tiberius: Here, Macro, we assign thee, both to spy, Inform, and chastise; think, and use thy means, Thy ministers, what, where, on whom thou wilt; Explore, plot, practise: all thou dost in this, Shall be, as if the senate, or the laws

95

Compare Poetaster, iv. vii. 44–7 (H&S).

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‘[W]hat, where, on whom thou wilt’: this permission translates the sexual license of Tiberius, vividly imagined by Arruntius in Act iv, into political practice.96 It is plain-speaking Arruntius who pithily sounds the hollowness of employment, its semantic and moral bankruptcy in the play’s terms, when he remarks of Laco: ‘Lepidus, | I’d sooner trust Greek Sinon, than a man | Our state employs’ (iii. 106–7 (iv, 360–1)). Hazlitt employed Sejanus at length at the Surrey Institution on 26 November 1819 in the fourth of his Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820). The composition of the lectures followed hard upon his work on the Letter, and in its early stages is likely to have overlapped with the rapid writing of this most dazzling of Hazlitt’s invectives. Early in February 1819, as Hazlitt offered an outline of his proposed lecture series to P. G. Patmore, secretary of the Surrey Institution, he also wrote to Whitmore and Fenn, proprietors of a London circulating library, asking to borrow three volumes of The Quarterly Review, containing articles on his books The Round Table, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, and Lectures on the English Poets, to which he responds at length in the Letter.97 On 9 July 1819, he offered Patmore a revised order for the lectures, the first of which quickly written series was delivered on 5 November.98 A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. From William Hazlitt, Esq, published at the author’s own expense on 1 March 1819,99 opens with a litany of charges, redolent of the concerns I outlined in Sejanus. The atmosphere of patronage and preferment that permeates Gifford’s letters to Canning is in Hazlitt’s prose given a sickly cast; Gifford’s relationships with his ‘employers’ are brutally anatomized. Gifford’s position as editor of the Quarterly and as paymaster of the band of Gentleman Pensioners is one, as Hazlitt presents it, securely ‘under the protection of the Court’: Gifford, he writes, is ‘the Government Critic, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy—the invisible link, that connects literature with 96 Jonson’s apparent error of chronology in placing Tiberius on Rhodes prompts Gifford, uncharacteristically, to suggest and remedy a lacuna in the text (iii. 98–9). 97 Respectively, 3 and 2–6 Feb. 1819: The Letters of William Hazlitt, ed. Herschel Moreland Sykes, Willard Hallam Bonner, and Gerald Lahey (London: Macmillan, 1979), 193–4, 195; dating follows Stanley Jones’s corrective review (The Library, 6th ser., 2 (1980), 356–62). 98 Hazlitt, Selected Writings, ed. Wu, v. pp. xvii–xviii. 99 Ibid. p. xxiii.

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the police’ (v. 343). Measuring writing by ‘a scale not of literary talent but of political subserviency’, Hazlitt writes, Gifford’s ‘zeal’ for king and country is such that he endeavours ‘to pamper the one into a tyrant, and to trample the other into a herd of slaves’ (v. 343–4). The close links between the Letter and ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’ are stressed by Hazlitt’s mocking reference to Gifford’s dedication of Jonson’s Works to Canning (v. 355), but more importantly by the following crescendo of orchestrated rhetoric: Your employers, Mr. Gifford, do not pay their hirelings for nothing—for condescending to notice weak and wicked sophistry; for pointing out to contempt what excites no admiration; for cautiously selecting a few specimens of bad taste and bad grammar, where nothing else is to be found. They want your invincible pertness, your mercenary malice, your impenetrable dulness, your barefaced impudence, your pragmatical self-sufficiency, your hypocritical zeal, your pious frauds to stand in the gap of their prejudices and pretensions, to fly-blow and taint public opinion, to defeat independent efforts, to apply not the sting of the scorpion but the touch of the torpedo to youthful hopes, to crawl and leave the slimy track of sophistry and lies over every work that does not ‘dedicate its sweet leaves’ to some luminary of the Treasury Bench, or is not fostered in the hot-bed of corruption. (v. 361)100

The connection of this attack with Hazlitt’s earlier attention to Jonson and Gifford should now be evident: Gifford’s ‘invincible pertness’, for one, recalls the ‘pert ejaculations of surprise’ that Hazlitt had attributed to him in The Examiner notice of ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’. Jonson had been on Hazlitt’s mind in the sentence immediately preceding this long paratactic indictment (he mockingly suggested that a ‘courteous reader’—the adjective is loaded—must in future ‘look for a knowledge of Shakespeare only in the editor of Ben Jonson’), but it is tempting to think that he is at work more subtly in the charges laid. One in particular seems to have pleased Hazlitt, since he recurred to it in the portrait of Gifford in The Spirit of the Age, when he wrote there that Gifford ‘fly-blows an author’s style, and picks out detached words or phrases for cynical reprobation’ (vii. 181). It is a verb he took from Jonson. Compare Arruntius’s disgust at the fawning Cotta, Haterius, and Latiaris in their adulation for Sejanus: Gods! how the sponges open and take in, And shut again! look, look! is he not blest

100

Hazlitt’s signalled quotation adapts Romeo and Juliet, i. i. 149–50.

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Theatre, Criticism, Editing That gets a seat in eye-reach of him? more, That comes in ear, or tongue-reach? O but most, Can claw his subtle elbow, or with a buz Fly-blow his ears? (iii. 139 (v, 506–11))

The physical revulsion of this description, its disgust in eye-, ear- and tongue-reach, and the corruption incipient in the buzzing parasites, is strikingly at one with Hazlitt’s revolted picture of Gifford’s ‘slimy track’ and the ‘hot-bed’ of the regency court. Yet the verb matters more: as the most recent editor of Sejanus observes, it seems to be Jonson’s coinage,101 and we see here the very texture of the play informing and enriching Hazlitt’s disgust. But why Sejanus particularly? Partly, at least, because there is good reason to think that the play was on Hazlitt’s mind and in his ear at this period. The Quarterly had disputed Hazlitt’s assertion in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays that ‘The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’ (i. 125): If we look to the history of mankind we shall learn from this new theory of the ‘pleasures of the imagination,’ that it is not natural for us to sympathise in the distresses of suffering virtue, but that whatever we may pretend, we are, in truth, gratified by the cruelties of Domitian or Nero. The crimes of revolutionary France were of a still blacker die; but we cannot recollect that they were heard of with much satisfaction in this country.102

The move from imagination, through classical history, to contemporary politics is one which Hazlitt picks up on, and to which he replies in the Letter: To prove that I am wrong . . . you bring in illustration the cruelties of Domitian and Nero, whom you suppose to have been without flatterers, train-bearers, or executioners, and ‘the crimes of revolutionary France of a still blacker die,’ (a sentence which alone would have entitled you to a post of honour under Sejanus,) which you suppose to have been without aiders or abettors. (v. 365)

Sejanus is, of course, Hazlitt’s addition to the debate: the reference argues strongly that the play was current in his thinking as a portrait of a court, peopled by flatterers, in which Gifford would have found himself at home: he is the very type of the flatterer, the train-bearer, and the 101 102

Sejanus, ed. Ayres, v. 510–11 n. Quarterly Review, 18 (1818), 465.

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literary executioner, paid (Hazlitt alleges) ‘to sacrifice what little honesty, and prostitute what little intellect you possess to any dirty job you are commissioned to execute’ (v. 361–2). To turn to the account of Sejanus which Hazlitt delivered to the Surrey Institution in November 1819 is further to confirm this pattern of association. Partly this is to be struck by the thoroughness with which Hazlitt’s prose is permeated by the linguistic texture of Jonson’s play. Thus, Hazlitt’s observation that Jonson ‘may be said to mine his way into a subject, like a mole’ (v. 242) takes its figure and impetus from Jonson’s description, in the address ‘To the Readers’ prefacing Sejanus, of ‘those common torturers that bring all wit to the rack; whose noses are ever like swine spoiling and rooting up the Muses’ gardens; and their whole bodies like moles, as blindly working under earth, to cast any, the least, hills upon virtue’ (iii. 6 (ll. 29–33)). Burrowing into Hazlitt’s text, Jonson’s moles continue their progress and their transformations: Hazlitt later professes himself ‘half afraid to give any extracts’ from the play, ‘lest they should be tortured into an application to other times and characters’ (v. 243). And it is the court that comes to predominate, as it had in the Letter: Jonson, Hazlitt writes, had thought through his sources to such effect ‘that the vices and the passions, the ambition and servility of public men, in the heated and poisoned atmosphere of a luxurious and despotic court, were never described in fuller or more glowing colours’ (v. 243). So too, the fear of surveillance pervading Sejanus that finds expression in Rufus’s assertion, ‘To be a spy for traitors, | Is honourable vigilance’ (1816, iii. 101 (iv, 224–5)), draws Hazlitt’s attention.103 He comments: ‘This sentiment of the respectability of the employment of a government spy, which had slept in Tacitus for near two thousand years, has not been without its modern patrons’ (Selected Writings, ed. Wu, v. 243).104 It is as delicious a use of employment as the link back to the Letter’s description of Gifford as the ‘Government Critic’ is clinching: the word turns back questioningly on ‘respectability’ and the courtly strain of false thought to which it belongs. We see here in Hazlitt the same remarkable ability to assimilate and revive his sources demonstrated by Jonson in Sejanus: he thinks about Jonson, and about Gifford, through the very texture of the play he discusses; his prose is alive in more than simply 103 Hazlitt substitutes ‘on’ for ‘for’ when quoting the lines, occluding a nice ambivalence: Selected Writings, ed. Wu, v. 243. 104 On Britain’s ‘spy culture’, see David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance, Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992).

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critical ways to Jonson’s writing. In the links to which I have been attending, Jonson bears on Hazlitt’s thought, shaping it and prompting him to some of his finest writing. This nexus of concerns also moves us away from the more purely critical estimation of, and engagement with, Jonson which a narrow critical focus on Gifford’s edition, its antecedents and its readers, would entail: reading Hazlitt, we see Jonson influencing later writings not only as a mediated presence but working directly upon style and form, and reacting with contemporary political and literary concerns.

III This is not the place to examine the reception of Hazlitt’s Letter, though Hunt, in The Examiner and later in his satire on Gifford, Ultra-Crepidarius (1823),105 and Keats, who copied large extracts in a letter to the George Keatses, both paid tribute to Hazlitt’s success.106 Rather, we ought to appreciate that, whatever his participation in a much more longlasting controversy of rivalry between Shakespeare and Jonson (and their champions), Hazlitt was able to employ Jonson’s writings in the pursuit of more immediately controversial aims. In doing so, his critical and political engagement is not innocent of more literary, imaginative responses, and is most valuable when it coexists with them. It is this aspect of Hazlitt’s response, for instance, which most clearly separates his account of Sejanus from that delivered earlier by John Thelwall, for all that their politics are close: Thelwall’s language, unlike Hazlitt’s, does not respond to Jonson’s. Part II of my book now turns to investigate further such literary and allusive responses to Jonson in the Romantic age, taking the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as its centre. In doing so, I question T. S. Eliot’s contention that for too long Jonson had failed to provide a ‘creative stimulus’ to later writers, and that ‘we must look back as far as Dryden—precisely, a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson—before we find a living criticism of Jonson’s 105 See the two-part review in The Examiner (7 and 14 Mar. 1819); Leigh Hunt, UltraCrepidarius: A Satire on William Gifford (London: John Hunt, 1823), besides extracting a long section of the Letter (pp. 25–40), has Mercury instruct Gifford in rollicking anapaests: ‘Thus, edit no authors but such as unite | With their talents a good deal of dirt or of spite; | Ben Jonson, because he was beastly and bluff; | And Massinger,—mince through his loathsomer stuff ’ (p. 17). 106 12 and 13 Mar. 1819 (Letters, ed. H. E. Rollins, ii. 71–6).

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works’.107 Eliot’s words, I want to argue, have themselves for too long discouraged criticism from attending to, or becoming properly aware of, writers after 1700 whose work has been given life by, and has returned it to, Jonson’s. 107 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ben Jonson’, in his Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 147–60.

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5

Francis Godolphin Waldron and The Sad Shepherd, II The Sad Shepherd was first printed in 1641 under a motto from Virgil’s Eclogues: nec erubuit sylvas habitare Thalia. Jonson’s choice of epigraph (or possibly that of his literary executor, Kenelm Digby) is an assertion simultaneously of generic modesty and self-belief: ‘My Muse . . . blushed not to dwell in the woods.’1 In offering not only a critical edition but a continuation of Jonson’s late, unfinished play, Francis Godolphin Waldron again looked to Virgil for an epigraph, choosing not the Eclogues but The Aeneid as his source. Beneath Jonson’s motto, the title-page of Waldron’s 1783 Sad Shepherd offered a second epigraph for his work: Sequiturque patrem non passibus æquis, ‘and [Iulus] follows his father with steps that match not his’.2 The line chosen by Waldron captures a dramatic, and skilfully allusive moment: it describes Aeneas’s preparations to leave Troy, with his father Anchises on his back and his son Ascanius (Iulus) held by the hand. As the three generations are stilled for a moment in their flight, their departure from the burning city is also a new beginning, with Aeneas (as Wordsworth’s translation would later style him) ‘Anxious for whom I lead, and whom I bear’.3 Waldron’s epigraph perhaps asks to be read in literary, Jonsonian terms: we might very well figure Jonson’s reputation as the sacked city from which this journey and continuation departs. But to do so would suggest that we identify Waldron as the subject of the epigraph: not with the father, Aeneas, but, more modestly, with his son, the following Ascanius.4 Waldron’s Sad Shepherd, like Ascanius, has literary life in the interstices of 1 Eclogues, vi. 2: Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Gould, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999–2000). 2 Aeneid, ii. 274: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. Fairclough and Gould. 3 Aeneid, ii. 976: William Wordsworth, Translations of Chaucer and Virgil, ed. Bruce E. Graver (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 4 The importance of following for Jonson is discussed by Ian Donaldson, Jonson’s Walk to Scotland (Edinburgh: Quadriga, 1992).

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a classic, in its undescribed vacancies and its afterlife: his is a subsequent creation.5 But the figure that the motto brings with it is not only one of incapacity, or of a child’s inadequate pursuit: it is also one of inheritance, of the coming into a literary paternity.6 Waldron’s motto figures him in futurity not only as a successor to Jonson, but as an heir. In what follows I seek to contextualize and explore such energies as are so quietly put into play by Waldron’s deft choice of epigraph; I look to raise and to foreground, with Waldron as my primary example, the issues that I pursue at greater length with other examples in Chapters 6 and 7. What place does Waldron’s choice of The Sad Shepherd have in the larger historical pattern of attention to Jonson through this period? How might Waldron’s account of the relationship of his text to Jonson’s offer us a point of entry into other situations in which writers of the Romantic age engage allusively and imitatively with Jonson? Waldron’s attention to The Sad Shepherd in 1783 anticipates a renewal of interest in Jonson’s pastoral, a renewal that forms a contemporary, ongoing context for his annotations. I take the local details of allusive engagements with Jonson by Waldron and his contemporaries in the service of the broader interests of Part II of this book: Jonson’s bearing not on the theatrical, critical, or editorial responses of the Romantic age, but on the imaginative.

I Never performed and only posthumously printed, The Sad Shepherd has always stood apart from Jonson’s other dramatic writings, and especially those we are accustomed now to call ‘late Jonson’. Anne Barton’s influential 1984 rereading of Jonson’s career annexed the play to a larger pattern of nostalgic retrospection that she observed in the dramatist’s later writings; and though her account has since been challenged and refined, The Sad Shepherd has not been central to that revision, and it is only in the past few years that it has begun to be addressed again by scholars.7 This variability of place in, and relationship to, the Jonsonian 5 On Ascanius see Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 186. 6 As Paul Hammond has also suggested in his exploration of Dryden’s choice of the same epigraph for his translation of The Works of Virgil (1697): see his Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 218–82. 7 Anne Barton, Ben Jonson: Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Martin Butler, ‘Late Jonson’, in Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds., The Politics

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canon was apparent earlier in the play’s reception history also. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this ‘exquisitely beautiful fragment’, this ‘broken gem’ (as it was termed by The British Critic in 1818), was singled out for praise in ways in which Jonson’s other writings, though still live, were not.8 This preference for the incomplete, unfinished Jonson over the polished, unyielding completeness of his other works saw it used as a measure for many different kinds of later writing. Besides Waldron’s continuation, at the start of my period, consider the sources to which Francis Jeffrey later traced Keats’s indebtedness when he wrote of Endymion in The Edinburgh Review: The models upon which he has formed himself, in the Endymion, are obviously the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson;—the exquisite metres and inspired diction of which he has copied with great boldness and fidelity—and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air which breathes only in them and in Theocritus.9

What was obvious to Jeffrey can be more subtly confirmed. Endymion, infused at large with The Sad Shepherd, is also marked locally by its allusions to Jonson’s song from Cynthia’s Revels, ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair’.10 Keats, in a letter written to the George Keatses on 18 September 1819, some two years after the composition of Endymion, later had recourse to the precision of Alken’s phrase from The Sad Shepherd when expressing delight in his infant niece: ‘I admire the exact admeasurement of my niece in your Mother’s letter—O the little span long elf.’11 The Sad Shepherd is also the implicit link between the two poems that Keats wrote early in February 1818, ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Lines of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London: Routledge, 1992), 166–88; Julie Sanders, ‘Jonson, The Sad Shepherd and the North Midlands’, Ben Jonson Journal, 6 (1999), 49–69. 8

British Critic, ns 10 (1818), 183–99, at 194. Edinburgh Review, Aug. 1820: quoted from G. M. Matthews, ed., Keats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), 203. Jeffrey’s comparison was quoted by Charles Brown in his biography of Keats (The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), ii. 60); it was lifted and compressed by D. M. Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century (1851): Keats: The Critical Heritage, 350. 10 See Endymion (ii. 170–1, 302–5) in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978); Michael Harbinson has recently suggested that this latter instance, memorably discussed by Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 71, might rather derive from Dryden: see his ‘Keats and Dryden—Source or Analogue’, Notes & Queries, ns 48 (2001), 138–40. 11 The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), ii. 189. Rollins notes a possible, though I think unlikely, 9

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on the Mermaid Tavern’, following a sociable evening with Horaces Twiss and Smith which had ‘revived thoughts of Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and others’; both poems were included in a letter to Reynolds on 3 February.12 Indeed, as Nicholas Roe has argued, The Sad Shepherd even offers an index of Keats’s gradual distancing from Leigh Hunt around this period; Hunt, whose Foliage (1818), as well as paying Jonson’s Forest and Underwood the compliment of imitation in its ‘Greenwoods’ and ‘Evergreens’, also adopted an epigraph from The Sad Shepherd on the half-title to the first of these two sections.13 Literary lecturers, too, spoke of the attractions of what Hazlitt called this ‘beautiful fragment’. Lecturing in 1820, the year in which Jeffrey’s review of Endymion had appeared, Hazlitt contrasted Milton’s use of Fletcher in Comus (‘Whatever Milton copied, he made his own’) with Jonson’s debts to The Faithful Shepherdess in The Sad Shepherd. He took up a tone and a critical vocabulary closely allied to Jeffrey’s to suggest that Jonson’s fragment ‘comes nearer’ its original than Comus, in style and spirit, but still with essential differences, like the two men, and without any appearance of obligation. Ben’s is more homely and grotesque. Fletcher’s is more visionary and fantastical. I hardly know which to prefer. If Fletcher has the advantage in general power and sentiment, Jonson is superior in naivet´e and truth of local colouring.14

Na¨ıvet´e in the writer whom Hazlitt elsewhere characterized as the most worked at and literary in his effects is remarkable.15 Earlier in the decade, in a long note written in the front endpapers of the 1811 edition of Jonson which he had purchased, as his proud inscription recalled, on 29 March 1815, Samuel Taylor Coleridge also separated The Sad Shepherd from the rest of Jonson’s writing, comparing ‘the faint Interest, that these noble intermediate source, John Hamilton Reynolds’s use of the line as an epigraph to ‘The Fairies’, The Champion, 4 Aug. 1816 (not 2 Aug. 1816, as Letters, ii. 189). 12

Letters, ii. 225 and n.; Poems of John Keats, 228–31, 592–4. Leigh Hunt, Foliage; or, Poems Original and Translated (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818); Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 140–55. In an Examiner article on ‘Old May-Day’ (10 May 1818), Hunt quoted at length from The Sad Shepherd for ‘the particular nature of it’s [sic] allusions, some which are singularly applicable to the present times’: ‘Here’, he wrote, ‘is the whole history of the loss of our rural pleasures’ (290–1). 14 The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), v. 36, 237. 15 He also praised Kean’s performance as Abel Drugger in Francis Gentleman’s adaptation of The Alchemist, The Tobacconist, as ‘an exquisite piece of ludicrous naivet´e,’ in A View of the English Stage (Selected Writings, iii. 58). 13

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efforts of the intellectual power excite’ with what he called ‘the exception of the Sad Shepherd’—an exception, he wrote, ‘because in that fragment only is there any character, in whom you are morally interested’.16 Moral interest and poetic interest are not unproblematically allied in much of Coleridge’s thought; but he felt the force of Jonson’s writing, and its bearing on his own, as acutely as the scrupulousness of the annotation quoted above must suggest. To return to Waldron’s continuation of The Sad Shepherd is to see that it anticipates not only one of the key locations in which writers of the Romantic age engaged with Jonson, but also one of the key frames through which they and their commentators understood that engagement: an enquiry into how one might describe the relationships of imitative or allusive later writing to its earlier sources and models. Waldron’s own sense of the number of occasions on which his continuation comes close to, or can be felt to follow, other texts is again and again evident, both in the printed text and in his manuscript annotations. The margins of his two retained copies of The Sad Shepherd, as we have seen in Chapter 1, abound with parallels and curiosities; and as various are the frameworks within which to situate his sense of the relationship between his own text and those that crowd in upon it. Waldron’s printed text and annotations provide us with a useful set of different ways—test cases, almost—in which to understand how a later text can be related to an earlier one. Only one note in the annotated copy of his Sad Shepherd now in the Dyce collection of the National Art Library was signalled out by Waldron with his initials. It relates to six lines of his continuation that he marked in ink with a vertical line in the left-hand margin and then keyed to his note at the foot of the page with an inked ‘x’. The lines of the continuation are spoken by Robin, addressing the lovelorn Karolin: Let us not then repine, for we are plac’d In Albion’s colder clime; not all the frost Her icyest winters glaze our streams withal, Hath pow’r to chill the bosom of her sons; Wherein love’s fire maintains such constant heat, That an eternal fervid summer reigns!

At the foot of the page, Waldron transcribed five lines from John Fletcher’s play The Prophetess, first printed in 1632, with the remark: ‘N.B. | I had 16 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), iii. 171. There are no annotations to The Sad Shepherd.

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not read this till the above was published. F.W.’ The lines that occasioned this note sit oddly with the signatory flourish of the initials: Oh, dear aunt, I languish For want of Diocles’ sight: He is the sun That keeps my blood in a perpetual spring; But in his absence, cold benumbing winter Seizes on all my faculties.17

How are we to understand this coincidence of language? Waldron’s attention, so far as it can be reconstructed from the note, seems to have been caught by the parallel between his own Robin’s conception of ‘love’s fire’ and Drusilla’s description of Diocles as ‘the sun | That keeps my blood in perpetual spring’. The parallel, if parallel it is, operates not so much at a verbal as at a conceptual level; and such closeness as exists between the two passages is further questioned by the distance that holds them apart dramatically. The lines are spoken in Fletcher’s play by Drusilla to Delphia, her aunt and the prophetess of the play’s title; they are spoken in a private situation by a younger to an older woman; they are spoken of a man who, the play’s dramatis personae tells its readers, is ‘a private Souldier elected Co-Emperour’ of Rome. Waldron’s lines, spoken by Robin to the young man Karolin in front of a public woodland gathering, function in a very different context. Moreover, there is no sense in Waldron’s note that one passage precipitated the other: in fact, the note explicitly, if wonderingly, refutes that possibility: ‘I had not read this till the above was published.’ Fletcher is here (we might think) not a source for Waldron, but simply an analogue. If that is so, Waldron’s text cannot then be said to allude to Fletcher: the parallel remains simply a parallel, a curiosity of phrase. Such problematic moments as this, when they attend on our reading of Waldron’s note, press elsewhere on the literary texture of his continuation. In his annotations both to the British Library and Dyce copies of The Sad Shepherd, Waldron demonstrates a scrupulous sensitivity to the fabric of his text. But he appears to lack, at least in such annotations as these, a frame of thought within which to analyse that sensitivity, and by which to move from observation to analysis. Instead, the tone of quiet, slightly baffled triumph at the proximity of his own work to that of his

17 I quote Waldron’s transcription of The Prophetess, ii. i. 46–50 in George Walton Williams, ed., The Prophetess, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96).

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sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors seems content simply to point up moments where one pattern of language recalls, if it has not been formed by, another. But there are other moments in Waldron’s continuation when one passage’s recall of another is quite deliberate, for the later passage avowedly imitates the earlier, bringing it into allusion’s play. Waldron suggested one such moment and one frame within which to understand it when printing his continuation in 1783. Waldron had there attached a note to Aeglamour’s lament over the ‘lost’ Earine, ‘Earine! where art thou?’ ‘The ideas’, he wrote, ‘and some of the very words in this speech are borrowed from Jonson’s Epheme.’ The misspelled reference to Eupheme, the sequence of elegies written by Jonson on the death of Venetia Digby, was derived from a typographical error in Peter Whalley’s edition of Jonson, to which Waldron’s note refers his reader. But what ideas or words had Waldron borrowed? Aeglamour apostrophizes Earine: O gentle spright! late rapt to heav’n so high, Still dost thou deign, pure essence! to come nigh Earth’s grossness thus? and, for thou see’st us dull, And clogg’d with clay, our souls thou fain would’st pull Forth their frail thralls, by some celestial sleight, And waft them hence to thy own starry height.18

Waldron’s note to Whalley’s edition refers his reader to two stanzas from Jonson’s poem ‘The Mind’ (Und. 84.iv), the fourth in the sequence of elegies, that cross the page-break: But that a mind so rapt, so high So swift, so pure, should yet apply Itself to us, and come so nigh Earth’s grossness; there’s the how and why. Is it because it sees us dull, And sunk in clay here, it would pull Us forth, by some celestial slight, Up to her own sublimed height?19

What is the relation between the ‘pulling forth’ of Jonson’s poem and that later ‘pulling forth’ that is Waldron’s note to it? One answer to the 18 F. G. Waldron, The Sad Shepherd; or, a Tale of Robin Hood, a Fragment (London: J. Nichols, 1783), 61–2. 19 I quote the text of 1756, vii. 26–7, including its reading of ‘sunk’ for ‘stunk’.

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question is that the traces left by Jonson’s text in Waldron’s are themselves traces from which both pieces of writing seek to free themselves. Just as Jonson’s persona in ‘The Mind’ had highlighted the dissimilarity between Venetia Digby’s ‘mind so rapt, so high’ and ‘Earth’s grossness’, so does Waldron’s Aeglamour question the drowned Earine: ‘late rapt to heavn’n so high, | Still dost thou deign, pure essence! to come nigh | Earth’s grossness thus?’ Waldron’s lines, themselves comparative, enjoin a further comparison on their reader: between themselves and Jonson’s lines, between allusion and source. It happens again in the same passage: Jonson’s speaker had thought himself ‘dull, | And sunk in clay here’; Waldron’s Aeglamour had imagined himself (as seen by Earine) ‘dull, | And clogg’d with clay’. What Waldron had described as ‘borrowed’ in his note here appears less easily shaken off, less returnable: the ‘clay’ that holds on to the speakers’ imaginations in the two texts could perhaps be thought of as representing the hold of a shared language over their authors. But however sunk or clogged Waldron’s borrowings, his note makes clear that the meaning of his continuation cannot exist in isolation from its Jonsonian source; its meaning relies rather on the reader’s being aware of the source of his borrowing, and the reader’s assessment of the interest paid on that loan by the later text—of the literary ‘sleight’ of the later author in pulling the earlier lines into play with his own. No similar note is attached to Marian’s speech later in the continuation to Act iii, but it, too, has Jonsonian precedents. Marian speaks to Robin of their happiness, made more perfect by his having defended it against the attacks of the witch, Maudlin; she contrasts her happiness with that of Amie. Light griefs make after-joys more bright appear, As clouds dispers’d still shew the heav’ns more clear. But here’s a gentle maid demands our care; Tender as buds, as new-blown lilies fair; Drooping with love, and withering with despair.20

Waldron has in his ear the central stanza of Jonson’s ‘A Nymph’s Passion’ (Und. 7), allusions to which are dispersed through the five lines of Marian’s speech: He is, if they can find him, fair, And fresh and fragrant too As summer’s sky, or purged air, 20

Waldron, Sad Shepherd, 65.

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And looks as lilies do That are this morning blown; Yet, yet I doubt he is not known, And fear much more, that more of him be shown.21

If we are to take up Waldron’s earlier distinction, Jonson’s nymph and Waldron’s Marian share not only ‘ideas’ but some of the same ‘very words’ here. The ‘clouds dispers’d’ of Marian’s speech find their precedent in the nymph’s ‘purged air’; Marian’s ‘new-blown lilies fair’ depend on the ‘lilies . . . | That are this morning blown’ of Jonson’s nymph, and take also their rhyming adjective from that used earlier of her ‘fair’ lover. The two pairs of voices, those of Marian and the nymph, and of Waldron and Jonson, speak together, deliberately so. But why should Waldron have signalled the relationship of the two passages quoted in the previous paragraph but left these, no less evident, unmentioned? If my previous example signalled its allusive relation to Jonson, this moment of textual closeness appears covert, concealed. What relation does the ‘fear’ of Jonson’s nymph—‘Yet, yet I doubt he is not known, | And fear much more, that more of him be shown’—have to Waldron’s lack of annotation, either in print or manuscript, to this passage? Are the revelations feared by Jonson’s nymph linked to the concealments of Waldron’s text? Such questions, with such a small achievement as Waldron’s continuation, might seem over-curious. But when a far greater poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, again rewrites Jonson’s ‘A Nymph’s Passion’ (in his ‘Mutual Passion’), having earlier availed himself of precisely the same lexicon of borrowing and indebtedness as Waldron, we might think that the issues raised, if here only small-scale, demand more consecutive attention than has previously been afforded them. I take up Coleridge’s ‘Mutual Passion’ in Chapter 6. I do so because what I find present both in Waldron and in Coleridge is symptomatic of a far larger set of questions—questions that have to do with Jonson’s continued presence as an important predecessor of certain strands of writing in the Romantic age. Among other instances of Coleridge’s alluding to Jonson, then, ‘Mutual Passion’ takes a central part in the argument of the following chapters. T. S. Eliot’s statement that for too long Jonson had failed to provide a ‘creative stimulus’ to later writers, located Dryden as the last poetic 21

I quote the text of 1756, vi. 354.

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voice that had engaged with and learned from Jonson.22 As I suggested at the close of Chapter 4, I find that Eliot’s formulation is now in need of revision. The following two chapters seek, by relating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s critical to his unjustly neglected imaginative engagements with Jonson, to remedy Eliot’s formulation, and to suggest that Coleridge precisely fulfils Eliot’s definition of a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson. In doing so, I seek also to offer a historicized discussion of allusion as an appropriate analytical framework through which to understand Coleridge’s responses to Jonson. Though Romantic and Jonsonian allusion are both long-established and fruitful areas of study, Romantic allusions to Jonson have scarcely been canvassed, let alone explored.23 In part this is because Jonson stands to one side of Shakespeare and Milton in his importance for the shaping of Romantic writing and its responses to the past, and has therefore been less present in our accounts of that writing and relationship. There is (to take one relevant example) no Jonsonian equivalent to Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination or his Shakespearean Constitutions.24 If Jonson, on this understanding, is a writer much more hospitable to the Regency (and the Regency a mode of politics and taste much more hospitable to Jonson) than he is to its temporal partner, Romanticism (or it to him), he is also, as I have shown, still contested and contestable territory in the period. Yet English Romanticism does have its Jonsonian constitutions, local shapings of language and thought that are, though little explored, accessible to scholarship. By taking Coleridge as the focus for an account of Jonson’s allusive relationships to writers of the Romantic age, most particularly Robert Southey and Hartley Coleridge, I try to do two things. The first is to accept the invitation extended by J. C. C. Mays’s 22 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ben Jonson’, in his Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 147–60. 23 Points of departure for an understanding of Romantic allusion include W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1970); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1975); Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and, besides the two books by Jonathan Bate mentioned in the following note, the essays collected in Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), remains the standard account of Jonsonian allusion. 24 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), and idem, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

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new edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works to attend to the ways in which ‘Coleridge’s mind worked in poetry’, not only in the handful of poems central to his canon but to those less highly prized and less frequently studied.25 By reading in Chapter 6 his early drama Osorio (revised and later performed as Remorse) alongside his writings for The Courier in 1811 (among them two adaptations of lyrics from Jonson’s The Underwood), I seek to trace the shape of, and contexts for, Coleridge’s allusive relationship to Jonson; by reading in journalism, poetry, and marginalia, Chapter 7 describes Coleridge’s post-1815 relationship with Southey and Hartley Coleridge through Jonson. Through the lens of their responses to Jonson I seek to demonstrate that Jonson, far from being isolated in the period, could be politically and personally vital to its writers. But, as I look to map Jonson’s allusive presence, I seek also to do something else: to read Romantic engagements with Jonson within an understanding of allusion that, although it owes a great deal to Christopher Ricks’s supple understanding of ‘The Poet as Heir’, looks also to question that understanding historically. I offer this historical questioning through a series of close readings, and by relating allusion’s lexicon of borrowing and indebtedness to the period’s financial concerns with currency and liquidity. Coleridge’s thinking about allusion gathers around his thinking about Jonson over his career; by keeping these two aspects of his thought together, Part II of this book seeks to understand Jonson’s importance for Romantic poetry beyond the confines of the marginal position to which he has hitherto been relegated. 25 S. T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols. in 6 pts. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Ii, p. cliii.

6

Allusive Jonson, I: Coleridge ‘It is inconceivable how Mr Coleridge can write such stuff, and think it tolerable.’ Thus wrote Thomasina Dennis, governess to the two children of Josiah Wedgwood, after having heard ‘Mr & Mrs W. of Cote House’ (Josiah’s brother, John and his wife) repeat to her ‘some curious Passages’ from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s then unpublished tragedy, Osorio: A Man approaching a Cavern at night, is in danger of falling into a pit—‘He went three steps and lifted up his leg.’ After this prudent precaution he enters the Caves and hearing water drop from the roof, falls into a Soliloquy, ‘Drip, drip, drip! and what has it to do, but to drip, drip, drip? &c &c’1

It is hard to measure Dennis’s prose here against the verse drama she quotes, a drama that in these quotations at least is itself interested in measurement, its ‘three steps’ keeping pace with the twice-repeated ‘drip, drip, drip’. Dennis, as she describes the ‘prudent precaution’ that saved Coleridge’s nameless character from ‘falling into a pit’, soon after precipitates him inadvertently ‘into a Soliloquy’; the fallings and failings of her own prose are in keeping with the dripping lines of Coleridge that she quotes. But the question remains: how, indeed, even if he thought it ‘tolerable’, could Coleridge ‘write such stuff’? William Hazlitt’s account of Jonson’s ‘detached poetry’, delivered to the Surrey Institution on 10 December 1819, offered perhaps one answer. This lecture saw Hazlitt in considered readjustment of the position he had adopted a year previously when comparing Shakespeare and Jonson. Hazlitt responded to an occasionally unfavourable review of his English Comic Writers in The Scotsman (‘To Ben Johnson, who has too little fancy to please Mr Hazlitt, justice has not been done’),2 by carefully drawing a distinction between the failures of Jonson’s comic humour and the ‘specific gravity’ of his poetry. And in observing the specific effects of that gravity, he offered a parallel between Jonson and Coleridge: 1 R. S. Woof, ‘Coleridge and Thomasina Dennis’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 32 (1962), 37–54. 2 The Scotsman, 17 Apr. 1819; repr. in The Examiner, 6 June 1819, pp. 362–3.

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In one of the songs in Cynthia’s Revels, we find, amidst some very pleasing imagery, the origin of a celebrated line in modern poetry— Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, &c. This has not even the merit of originality, which is hard upon it. Ben Jonson had said two hundred years before, Oh, I could still (Like melting snow upon some craggy hill) Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature’s pride is now a wither’d daffodil.3

Hazlitt did not specify the source of the ‘celebrated line’, but it would by 1819 have been familiar: far removed from its manuscript origins, the line parodies one from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s tragedy Remorse, a revision of the unperformed Osorio, that ran for twenty nights at Drury Lane in 1813. The following discussion aims, as it addresses Dennis’s question, to take the measure of this perceived moment of proximity between Coleridge and Jonson. My reasons for choosing this moment owe something to John Jones’s apology in Shakespeare at Work for what he called the ‘relative weakness’ of an early example: ‘it allows me to raise these points and also to air an omnipresent procedural embarrassment: progress is not possible without examples, and yet to choose this example rather than any other makes one appear to commit oneself to it in a way one does not intend.’4 Those reasons also have to do with William Empson’s recognition that Coleridge ‘had always the fascination of the most extreme case of something’.5 My discussion, then, will use Hazlitt’s claims as a test case in the understanding of Coleridge’s allusive relationship with Jonson that this and the following chapter develops. Reception history, the study of a writer’s afterlives, can and ought to be more than a survey of theatrical presence, the critical judgements variously passed in lectures and in print, or of editorial activity; but it becomes a more difficult and a subtler business when, as here, the texture of imaginative writing is the focus of attention. To discuss Hazlitt’s claim in a lecture that ‘the description of Echo in Cynthia’s Revels’ was one of the two ‘most 3 The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), v. 285. 4 John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 6. 5 S. T. Coleridge, Selected Poems, ed. William Empson and David Pirie (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 97.

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poetical passages in Ben Jonson’ (v. 245) is quite a different matter from addressing this apparent coincidence of Cynthia’s Revels and Remorse, for all that the same text might be at issue. The claim for one poem having its source in, and meaning in relation to, another earlier text marks a new and different kind of enquiry—and one which, if it can be supported, cannot be confirmed by Hazlitt’s later having reprinted Echo’s song in his Select British Poets (1824).6 Such work makes demands of both memory and voice, ours and those of the writers; it asks, if we are concerned to decide if an allusion is present and, if so, what business it is about, that we attend carefully not only to the passage in question but also to its contexts. Osorio is the first of the contexts in which Coleridge and Jonson can be heard together.

I Osorio is an echoing play, and a play concerned with that peculiar sense of echo’s acoustical doubleness whose figurative importance John Hollander describes when he writes: ‘the word echo is used . . . to indicate a musical or linguistic repetition, usually of a short utterance or the terminal portion of a longer one, with the additional qualification that the repeated sound is not only contingent upon the first, but in some way a qualified version of it.’7 Hollander’s formulation—‘not only contingent upon the first, but in some way a qualified version of it’—is particularly apt as it reflects on the relation of Osorio to its own contingent dependant, the revised version of the play performed at Drury Lane in 1813 as Remorse.8 The history of 6 William Hazlitt, ed., Select British Poets; or, New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time with Critical Remarks (London: W. C. Hall, 1824), 815; reissued, heavily revised, in the following year as Select Poets of Great Britain (London: T. Tegg, 1825). Hazlitt suggested to the publisher Jean-Antoine Galignani, probably in July 1826, an unrealized edition of ‘The Old English Theatre’, which was to have included selections from The Sad Shepherd, Sejanus, and The Alchemist: see William Hazlitt to his Publishers, Friends and Creditors: Twenty-Seven New Holograph Letters, ed. Charles E. Robinson (York: Keats–Shelley Memorial Association, 1987), 32–4. 7 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 3; see also Joseph Loewenstein, Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and John Beer, ‘Echoes and Correspondences’, in his Romantic Influences: Contemporary-Victorian-Modern (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 192–217. 8 Osorio has suffered critically by the success of Remorse: Reeve Parker, ‘Osorio’s Dark Employments: Tricking Out Coleridgean Tragedy’, Studies in Romanticism, 33 (1994), 119–60, offers a convincing attempt to take Osorio seriously.

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that revision is familiar, and can briefly be summarized.9 Coleridge began writing Osorio at Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s suggestion in February 1797, and had completed a draft by October; yet, by December, as he wrote to Thomas Poole, he had received a letter, ‘the long & short of which is that Sheridan rejects the Tragedy’.10 After several earlier attempts at revision, Coleridge worked again on the play through 1812, and was able to write with satisfaction early in December that Remorse (as it was now called) had been accepted for performance at the reopening Drury Lane.11 A success in the theatre, Remorse proved also a financial success, going through two print editions: as Coleridge wrote delightedly to Poole, ‘I shall get more than all my literary Labors put together, nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy Losses in the Watchman & the Friend—400£: including the Copy-right.’12 But there are not only repetitions of Osorio in Remorse: as Hazlitt claimed to hear Jonson, so different readers have seen, as different auditors have heard, varying echoes, fragments, and traces of other texts in the aural and literary texture of both plays. Jonathan Bate has written of the Shakespearean echoes in Remorse and of their importance for what he calls, more largely in Coleridge, the problem of inherited language.13 Indeed, these Shakespearean and other echoes form part of the economy of Coleridge’s dramatic style: an economy formed by the process of circulation, exchange, and indebtedness that structures the relationship of his writing to the texts that precede it, of which, in part, it is made, and which it too, in turn, qualifies and adjusts. One figurative expression of this economy of reuse and appropriation is that offered by Coleridge when he wrote to Joseph Cottle in May 1798 after the initial rejection of Osorio. The play seemed, he wrote, ‘too bad to be published, too good to be squandered.—I think of breaking it up; the planks are sound, & I

9 The narrative is rehearsed in Remorse, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock, 1989), and more fully by J. C. C. Mays, in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols. in 6 pts. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), iii. 47–58, 1027–59; two new letters (of 20 Nov. 1797 and 10 Feb. 1798) are added by Edmund Garratt, ‘ ‘‘Lime Blossom, Bees & Flies’’: Three Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Sir James Mackintosh’, Romanticism, 7 (2001), 1–15. 10 See letters to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 6 Feb. 1797 (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), i. 304); to John Thelwall, 14 Oct. 1797 (i. 352); and to Poole, 2 Dec. 1797 (i. 358). 11 Coleridge to Josiah Wedgwood, 1 Dec. 1812 (Collected Letters, iii. 421). 12 To Thomas Poole, 13 Feb. 1813 (Collected Letters, iii. 437). 13 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 22–42.

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will build a new ship of old materials.’14 The question of whether that ship had itself already been compounded of old materials can best be approached, as Coleridge did Jonson, through Milton. When Teresa, in the second scene of Remorse, remarks plaintively to her guardian, Valdez, of her plight—married to one brother, Alvar, and courted in his absence by the other, Ordonio—she does so in words whose points of origin are multiple. The compassion expressed by Valdez, ‘I must not see thee wretched’, moves Teresa to exclaim: ‘There are woes | Ill bartered for the garishness of joy’ (i. ii. 18–19).15 The literary texture of these lines is as involved as the dramatic situation in which they are uttered, and in both parentage is equally at issue: Valdez, as well as being Teresa’s guardian, is also her father-in-law (Alvar and Ordonio are his sons); the lines spoken by Teresa in Remorse were once given to her double, Maria, in Osorio (i. i. 18–19), from whom in the process of revision they are inherited. But both female speakers carry an echo in their voices of another character who had been compelled to meditate upon paternity and inheritance, and who had had recourse in those meditations to the half-rhyme of woe and joy. The speaker was Milton’s Adam, anticipating a futurity in which he imagines his own curses, and those of his successors, turning back upon him: so besides Mine own that bide upon me, all from me Shall with a fierce reflux on me redound, On me as on their natural centre light Heavy, though in their dear place. O fleeting joys Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes!

Listen again to Remorse: ‘There are woes | Ill bartered for the garishness of joy.’ As the two pairs of lines move towards their shared and rotated half-rhyme, joys and woes changing place, they do so in parallel, through a shared language of financial exchange, Coleridge’s ‘Ill bartered’ trading on and exchanging places with Milton’s ‘dear bought’, which itself provides the metaphor whereby to discuss the means of their relationship. 14

To Joseph Cottle, 28 May 1798 (Collected Letters, i. 412). All quotations from Coleridge’s poetry and plays, unless otherwise noted, are taken from Poetical Works, ed. Mays; future reference will be given in the text; this and all further quotations from Remorse refer, unless otherwise noted, to May’s ‘Printed Text’ of the play. 16 John Milton, Paradise Lost, x. 737–42, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1998). 15

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What evidence might be offered to underpin such an observation of a later dramatic voice redounding benignly upon an epic precursor? First, one might note that Coleridge himself seems to have had an ear for other such occasions when dramatic echoes epic, and, over the course of his career, to have puzzled over what such an apprehension might mean. In December 1801, when it appears likely that he first read concentratedly in Ben Jonson’s dramatic works, he recorded in his Notebook an observation to which he was twice to return.17 It was Milton whom he heard again, but a Milton who had himself listened to Jonson: Milton’s address to the Sun—Ben Johnson’s first Lines of the Poetaster— Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves— Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy Darkness— 18

Eleven years later, Coleridge returned to and expanded upon the observation when it was printed among his contributions to Southey’s Omniana (1812): Those who have more faith in parallelism than myself, may trace Satan’s address to the Sun in Paradise Lost to the first lines of Ben Jonson’s Poetaster . . . But even if Milton had the above in mind, his own verses would be more fitly entitled an apotheosis of Jonson’s lines than an imitation.19

The diffidence with which Coleridge presents the observation attends also his estimation of the relative merits of the lines; but his faith in the parallelism cannot have been quite bankrupt, for in the margins of the copy of Jonson he acquired in 1815 he again returned to that evocative opening: 17 The date matters, for Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in 1802’, Essays in Criticism, 38 (1987), 209–33, suggests that whereas Wordsworth responded vitally to Jonson, Coleridge thought little of him, and did not trouble to adjust those views over a long writing life, a conclusion I contest. This consensus, derived in large part from the under-edited Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955), is regrettable, since Barton’s account has been widely endorsed: see Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 202–4, 457 n. 69; and Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 121–2. 18 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 1957–90), entry 1059. Q Poetaster’s Livor (Envy in the folio-based text that Coleridge probably read) owes a debt to Ovid’s Invidia (Metamorphoses, ii. 760–801, trans. F. J. Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984)), though her speech is Jonson’s invention; Livor is perhaps an importantly male precursor of Milton’s Satan. 19 S. T. Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995), 316–17.

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There is no reason to suppose Milton Satan’s address to the Sun in Par. Lost more than a mere coincidence with these Lines; but were it otherwise, it would be a fine Instance, what usurious Interest a great Genius pays in borrowing.20

Whose voice had he heard? As he worked at, and worked up, the observation, Coleridge became less sure. The voices of the characters who speak, and the voices of the writers, merge and then separate in Coleridge’s thought; but the frame of understanding that developed alongside his repetitions of the observation becomes sharper.21 From the brusque, dashed-off note of 1801, through the diffident ‘parallelism’ of 1812, and on to speculative economies of his final return to the thought after 1815, Coleridge developed a conceptual framework in which to couch his observation, one which allowed him to move from simply observing the proximity towards an understanding of the processes operating in it. The closeness of Jonson and Milton moves beyond its local immediacy to become a prompt for a larger account of how the two moments might be related. But that developing frame of understanding also has its sources. In August 1797, Coleridge borrowed the first two volumes of John Monck Mason’s The Dramatic Works of Philip Massinger (1779) from the Bristol Library.22 In Thomas Davies’s ‘Life’ of Massinger, reprinted by Monck Mason, he might have read as part of the following discussion of Massinger’s classical learning: That he was very conversant with the Greek and Roman Classics, his frequent Allusions to poetical Fable, and his interweaving some of the choicest Sentiments of the best antient Writers in his Plays, sufficiently demonstrate. What he borrowed from the Classics he paid back with Interest, for he dignified their Sentiments by giving them a new Lustre; while Jonson, the superstitious Idolater of the Antients, deforms his Style by affected Phraseology and verbal Translation; his Knowledge was unaccompanied by true Judgment and Elegance of Taste, and in the Incorporation of foreign Sentiments with his own, he understood not the Means to enrich his Composition by artfully borrowing from the dead Languages.23

20 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), iii. 170, 175. 21 Coleridge later adapted a speech from Poetaster i. i for the ‘Historie and Gestes of Maxilian’ (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1822) ), printed in Shorter Works, 981. 22 George Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowing of Southey and Coleridge, 1793–8’, The Library, 5th ser., 4 (1949), 114–32. 23 The Dramatic Works of Philip Massinger, ed. John Monck Mason, 4 vols. (London: T. Davies et al., 1779), i. pp. lxxix–lxxx.

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Allusion, on Davies’s account, is to be understood financially: borrowings, artful or not, are ‘paid back with Interest’, and serve to ‘enrich . . . Composition’. But it is also the case that Jonson is deliberately excluded from a full understanding of allusion: he serves in Davies’s comparison to set off Massinger’s virtues with his own corresponding failures. If Davies’s critical valuation of Jonson, however modish then, is not one that we would now fully endorse, Coleridge certainly may have remembered Davies’s words when he came to think of Jonson and Milton; if so, when he writes of the ‘usurious Interest a great Genius pays in borrowing’, he in turn repays the debt to Davies’s formulation with interest.24 But again the point remains debatable, important (indeed) because it is debatable: it serves here as another example of that literary extremity in Hazlitt’s claim that makes it the means whereby to test our methods of understanding when and how allusion might be felt to operate. How, then, does Hazlitt’s claim that there is a Jonsonian source for Coleridge’s line compare to the latter’s arguments for Milton’s source? In fact, the text of Remorse printed in 1813 offers no evidence to confirm Hazlitt’s contention: its closest approach to the line ‘quoted’ in the lecture seems to be Isidore’s complaint about ‘this crash of water drops!’ (iv. i. 9). But here the echoic texture of the play has conspired to muffle sounds that were more evident in its earlier versions. In the manuscript text of Osorio as it stood when Coleridge sent it to Sheridan in 1797, the fourth act had opened with the following lines, spoken by Ferdinand: Drip! drip! drip! drip!—in such a place as this It has nothing else to do but, drip! drip! drip! I wish it had not dripp’d upon my torch. (iii. 112; iv. i. 1–3)

Revisions to his retained manuscript, a transcript of the play in his wife’s hand, show Coleridge at work around what he clearly perceived as a difficulty, erasing the three lines quoted above and substituting in their place two others: This ceaseless, dreary Sound of water drops dropping Water! I would, they had not fallen upon my Torch! (iii. 159)

The later transcript that was submitted to the censor James Larpent on 5 January 1813, a version of the play that represents the first stage version 24 Mays has gone further, suggesting that Massinger’s plays might themselves be considered a ‘source’ for Osorio (S. T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, iii. 53).

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of Remorse, arrived at after three weeks’ rehearsal in the Green Room at Drury Lane, rejects even this revised version of the lines; and they are not subsequently, as we have seen, present in any of the printed texts of Remorse. Where, then, did Hazlitt ground his observation if Coleridge’s drips simply fell out of the text of Remorse? Coleridge’s Preface to the first edition of the play, probably written (as Mays notes) in late January 1813, offers in retrospect two further versions of the lines’ metamorphoses, and from these a stronger sense of Hazlitt’s target can be derived. Coleridge felt not a little ill-treated by Sheridan in the aftermath of Osorio’s rejection: in July 1800 he detailed the manager’s faults in a letter to Daniel Stuart,25 and seven years later, in a letter to the same correspondent, was still irate at the treatment he had received. Undoubtedly I should be less than a man, if I had not been indignant that within the last 12 months he has made me an object of ridicule among persons disposed to think well of me by misquoting a line, ridiculous enough in itself, & then asserting that it was a fair specimen of the whole Tragedy. But I should have felt much more indignation, if any friend had been so treated.26

Although Coleridge withheld from Stuart the line that Sheridan had misquoted, the printing of the successful Remorse proved too tempting an opportunity to pass up, his having suffered so long by the linked circulation of drips, derision, and the manuscript documents that contained them. The list of the charges laid against Sheridan in Coleridge’s preface is lengthy: that this very Person returned me no answer, and, spite of repeated applications, retained my Manuscript when I was not conscious of any other Copy being in existence (my duplicate having been destroyed by an accident); that he suffered this Manuscript to wander about the Town from his house, so that but ten days ago I saw the song in the third Act printed and set to music, without my name, by Mr. Carnaby, in the year 1802; likewise that the same person asserted (as I have been assured) that the Play was rejected, because I would not submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line; and finally in the year 1806 amused and delighted (as who was ever in his company, if I may trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a large company at the house of a highly respectable Member of Parliament, with the ridicule of the Tragedy, as ‘a fair specimen’, of the whole of which he adduced a line: 25 To Daniel Stuart, 15 July 1800 (Collected Letters, i. 603–4); on the same day, Coleridge called Sheridan ‘an unprincipled Rogue’ (Coleridge to Humphrey Davy (ibid. i. 606)). 26 Coleridge to Stuart, c.5 May 1807 (Collected Letters, iii. 14–15).

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‘Drip! drip! drip! there’s nothing here but dripping.’ In the original copy of the Play, in the first Scene of the fourth Act, Isidore had commenced his Soliloquy in the Cavern with the words: ‘Drip! drip! a ceaseless sound of water-drops.’ as far as I can at present recollect: for on the possible ludicrous association being pointed out to me, I instantly and thankfully struck out the line. (iii. 1065–6)27

It is an energized performance—but one that is most convincing as a performance rather than a statement of fact. Coleridge’s ‘instantly’ here covers a more gradual process of erosion and revision; and one in which, however worn down it might be, there is no extant manuscript authority for the so-called original version of the line quoted in the Preface to the first edition of Remorse in 1813. By the second edition, later in the year, this paragraph from the Preface had itself been cut. Yet even if the first edition’s preface was, as seems likely, Hazlitt’s source, rather than the play in performance, what impact does this have upon the moment he remarked upon in the lecture? By 1819, Hazlitt was no admirer of the politically ‘apostate’ Coleridge, whose views, he wrote, had ‘turned, but not to account’. In the course of five reviews—of Christabel, The Statesman’s Manual, and Biographia Literaria—written between June 1816 and August 1817 his strictures upon Coleridge grew ever more severe.28 Set against this background, a further dose of literary embarrassment, we might think, would be exactly the kind of effect for which Hazlitt would strive. Hazlitt certainly saw Remorse performed—with imperfect enjoyment, as he recalled two years later29 —and may well have contributed a notice of the production to the Morning Chronicle.30 Coleridge, at least, believed that Hazlitt was author of the notice, and writing to John Rickman commented: I hear that Hazlitt i[n the] M.C. has sneered at my presumption in [entering] the Lists with Shakespear’s Hamlet in Teresa’s Description of the two Brothers: when (so help me the Muses) that Passage never once occurred to my conscious 27 Mays’s text omits the opening bracket of Coleridge’s third parenthesis; I restore it from the 1st edn. of Remorse (London: W. Pople, 1813), p. v. 28 The reviews are collected in J. R. de J. Jackson, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970–91). 29 See The Examiner, 17 Sept. 1815: The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930–4), v. 247. 30 The Morning Chronicle notice (25 Jan. 1813) is unsigned, and not attributed to Hazlitt in Jackson, ed., Critical Heritage, i. 116; Howe believed there ‘to be no doubt’ of Hazlitt’s authorship (Complete Works, xviii. 463).

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recollection, however it may be, unknown to myself, have been the working Idea within me. But mercy on us! is there no such thing as two men’s having similar Thoughts on similar occasions—?31

For all his animus against Sheridan, Coleridge was well aware that aspects of the bluster in his letter had themselves aspects of Sheridan’s comedies: he self-mockingly protested to Rickman that ‘with Sir Fretful Plagiary in the Critic ‘‘I will print every word of it’’ ’.32 There would, then, be less ground for crediting Hazlitt’s observation had Coleridge himself not become acutely anxious about the literary texture of Remorse. In the cramped margins of the copy of the play which he sent to Sara Hutchinson on 20 February 1813, Coleridge gave voice to the uncertainties that had come to trouble his pleasure in its success: his marginal annotations register a growing sensitivity to the allusive texture of Remorse. The voices he registered in the play were sometimes those of other writers, and sometimes his own; such moments in which Coleridge notes self-allusion tend to the minute. Against the phrase ‘angel of the vision’—spoken by Alvar in Remorse (i. i. 55), but first used by Coleridge six years previously in ‘To William Wordsworth’ (iii. 817)—he gently protested to Sara: ‘May not a man without breach of the 8th Commandment take out of his left Pocket & put into his right?’ (iii. 1241 n.). Sixty lines later in the same scene, Alvar’s voice again troubled Coleridge, the line ‘the obscurest haunt | Of all the mountains’ (i. i. 115–16) producing the following observation: Till the Play was printed off, I never remembered or rather, never recollected, that this phrase was taken from Mr Wordsworth’s Poems. Thank God! it was not from his MSS Poems—& at the 2nd . Edition I was afraid to point it out, lest it should appear a trick, to introduce his name.—(iii. 1244 n.)

Coleridge’s fears are emblematic in their own way: paradoxically, an image of mutuality in an apparently solitary line, ‘the obscurest haunt’ is not merely clear, but keeps silently echoing company with Wordsworth’s line from The Brothers, ‘It is the loneliest place in all these hills’. This scrupulous tendency to clear, or at least to own, his allusive debts is evident again in Coleridge’s comment to Sara on the central section of the play: ‘little as the piece merits such trouble’, he told her, he intended 31

To John Rickman, 25 Jan. 1813 (Collected Letters, iii. 429). Ibid. iii. 428, in fact misremembering The Critic, where the words are Puff ’s: The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 537. 32

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to ‘re-work, & weed out the plagiarisms from (I declare, I know not which) Coleridge or Schiller’ (iii. 1285 n.). A letter to Southey earlier in the month rehearsed the same project, though in terms that step out from the metaphoric protection of plagiarism to confess starker, though still literary, crimes: As to my Thefts from the Wallenstein, they were on compulsion from the necessity of Haste—& do not lie heavy on my Conscience, being partly thefts from myself, & because I gave Schiller 20 for one I have taken. I shall, however, weed them out as soon as I can & in the meantime, I hope, they will lie snug.—‘The obscurest Haunt of all our Mountains’ I did not recognize as Wordsworth till after the Play was all printed.33

Coleridge was himself aware of the compounded voice of Remorse, and the number of texts which, itself contingent upon, it also qualifies. Earlier accounts of these marginalia to Remorse suspected Coleridge of authorial squeamishness; but to do so is to overlook the importance of his self-scrutiny and the evidence it provides of his own highly developed understanding of allusion.34 His comments upon the play demonstrate a keen awareness of the theoretical implications of such indebtedness: Coleridge was aware, not only of the lines he had borrowed from others, but equally of those he had borrowed from himself. At this late stage, we need to turn back to Jonson, and to return the four lines of Echo’s song quoted by Hazlitt to their full context: Slow, slow, fresh fount, keepe time with my salt teares; Yet slower, yet, oˆ faintly gentle springs: List to the heavy part the musique beares; Woe weepes out her division, when shee sings. Droupe hearbs and flowres; Fall griefe in showres; Our beauties are not ours: O, I could still (Like melting snow upon some craggie hill,) drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature’s pride is, now, a wither’d daffodill. (I. ii. 65–75)

By quoting only the four last lines of the song, Hazlitt did damage to the delicacy of Jonson’s lyric; but more particularly, by suppressing the 33

To Southey, 8/9 Feb. 1813 (Collected Letters, iii. 435). Charles S. Bouslog, ‘Coleridge’s Marginalia in the Sara Hutchinson Copy of Remorse’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 65 (1961), 333–8. 34

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line which, via its terminal colon, introduces the four he quotes, and whose painful intimations they qualify and expand, deprived himself of a perfectly weighted formulation of exactly the case he was making: ‘Our beauties are not ours.’ The haunting, limpid chiasmus, itself completing an insistently rhymed central triplet, speaks directly to the concerns of literary property and propriety, of the territory bounded on one side by allusion and on the other by plagiarism. But Coleridge’s drops, however we hear them, were not exactly Jonson’s drops: for one thing, when Jonson’s were performed, they were sung. A surviving contemporary musical setting doubly tempers the repetitions of the song’s penultimate line not only by a change of time signature from triple back to duple time—the setting of Jonson’s parenthetical ninth line, ‘(Like melting snow upon some craggy hill)’, had slowed the simile into triple time—but also by musically echoing the slow cadence of ‘Drop, drop, drop, drop’ with a descending minor scale in which the three voices echo one another’s fall in sequence.35 So too, as Echo should remind us, the full etymological sense in which repetitions ‘depend’ from or on an origin is at play in the song: the dialogue between Mercury and Echo in which the song occurs delightedly works within the frame of repeated endings that the two speakers share. In such a dramatic and acoustical environment, Jonson’s drops are a triumph, their potential for ridicule dissipated and qualified by their context; in the radically altered stage and aural conditions inhabited by Remorse, such effects are merely, compactly comic. Might Coleridge have been alluding, consciously or otherwise? Again the evidence is only partly conclusive: he might have been, had he wished. Not later than April 1796, Coleridge acquired what was to be the first of three sets of Robert Anderson’s A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain that he used in his lifetime.36 Echo’s song is printed among the disparate assemblage of songs from Jonson’s plays and masques, ungathered verse, and contemporary poems addressed to him that forms the ‘Miscellanies’ accompanying the three collections of his poetry; it follows the more famous ‘Hymn to Diana’, also from Cynthia’s Revels,

35 Henry Youll, Canzonets to Three Voices (1608), reprinted and discussed by Mary Chan, Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 50–4. Although Youll’s setting is unlikely to have been used in performance, Chan argues that it possibly preserves what was ‘originally a solo song for treble’, since the ‘music is structurally controlled by the verbal phrases set in the upper voice part’ (p. 54). 36 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, i. 39.

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to which Anderson refers in his introduction.37 It was in response to the purchase of Anderson that Coleridge drafted compendious ‘Memoranda for a History of English Poetry, biographical, bibliographical, critical and philosophical, in distinct Essays’, the seventh of which was to include: ‘7 Dryden & the History of the witty Logicians, butler (ought he not to have a distinct tho’ short Essay?)—B. Johnson, Donne, Cowley—Pope.’38 Slightly before, or slightly after, the initial composition of Osorio, the project is evidence of Coleridge’s deep immersion in the riches with which Anderson’s volumes provided him: it is one more possible support for the likelihood of his engaging with Jonson.39 What it is not is proof of Hazlitt’s contention: the coincidence noted by Hazlitt, for all the contextual material that can be offered around it, is not susceptible to confident adjudication either one way or another. Christopher Ricks has here usefully distinguished between allusion and source: ‘although to speak of an allusion is always to predicate a source (and you cannot call into play something of which you have never heard), a source may not be an allusion, for it may not be called into play.’40 If Echo’s song might be a source for Osorio and Remorse, Coleridge (in Ricks’s terms) need not have alluded to it. In turning now to offer a reading of two Jonson lyrics that Coleridge adapted and published in The Courier during 1811, my concerns, though related to the matter of source and allusion, are slightly altered. Here, where it is certain that Coleridge had Jonson on his mind, the question is not so much one of likelihood (whether or not an allusion is in and is at play) but of extent, and whether source and allusion pass over into the territory occupied by the third that walks always beside them: plagiarism.41 To Ricks any student of allusion 37 Robert Anderson, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, 14 vols. (London: John & Arthur Arch et al., 1793–1807), iv. 529; the songs are printed at iv. 609–10, so it is likely, had Coleridge followed this praise, that he would have read both. Wordsworth certainly knew the ‘Hymn’, well enough to write a nasty parody of the delicate lines in Oct. 1821: see Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 24 Oct. 1821 and 16 Jan. 1822 (The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de S´elincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88), i. 90, 103). 38 Shorter Works, 108; this text differs slightly from Inquiring Spirit, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951). The project is not securely datable: Coburn argues for a date close to the 1796 watermark of the paper on which the plan is drafted (Spirit, 153); Shorter Works, 107, suggests Autumn 1800. 39 The early volumes of Anderson were Coleridge’s favourites: he wrote from Malta in June 1804, ‘haunted by the Thought that I have lost a box of Books, containing Shakespeare (Stockdale’s), the 4 or 5 first Volumes of the British Poets’ (Collected Letters, ii. 1139). 40 Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9. 41 To this Ricks has also attended: ‘Plagiarism’ in his Allusion to the Poets, 219–40, first published in Proceedings of the British Academy, 97 (1998), 149–68.

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is indebted for the concise accuracy with which he has described the kind of attention such allusive writing requires: We should notice when the subject-matter of an allusion is at one with the impulse that underlies the making of allusions at all, because it is characteristic of art to find energy and delight in an enacting of that which it is saying, and to be rendered vigilant by a consciousness of metaphors and analogies which relate its literary practices to the great world.42

As I relate Coleridge’s engagement with Jonson historically to his other writings, I seek to keep open the relationship between their texts, but to do so within a discussion that relates them also to the non-literary practices of their time. I take these local examples to be symptomatic of larger energies in Coleridge’s writings; I work from a sense that his engagement with Jonson can most profitably be understood in relation to the whole area of issues around which he stretched his mind. Accordingly, one final piece of evidence might be offered in the case of Echo’s Song and Remorse, one that draws out the connections between the tropes of influence and finance that we have already observed in association with allusion. Writing to an unknown correspondent in December 1811, Coleridge, in avowing ‘utmost contempt’ for ‘parallelisms adduced in proof of plagiarism or even of intentional imitation’, offered a distinction between ‘two Kinds of Heads in the world of Literature. The one’, he wrote, ‘I would call, springs: the other tanks.’43 Whereas springs circulate and promote exchange, tanks hoard. He returned to the distinction in the Preface to Christabel (1816), where, introducing the poem with an account of its long composition, he wrote: The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself. For there is amongst us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man’s tank. (i. 481–2)

Set off against the holed, Latinate splendour of ‘perforation’, the percussive monosyllable, ‘tank’, with which the thought concludes, sounds 42 Ricks, ‘Dryden and Pope’, in Allusion to the Poets, 9–42, revised from first publication as ‘Allusion: The Poet as Heir’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds., Studies in the Eighteenth Century III (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), 209–40. 43 c.15–21 Dec. 1811 (Collected Letters, iii. 354–61).

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a more clankingly emphatic distaste than does the letter of 1811. But, as Hazlitt’s observation from Jonson’s ‘Slow, slow, fresh fount’ makes unfortunately clear, there are such things as fountains in literature also; and, in reading the texture of Coleridge’s verse, we ought to be aware of such moments when his language may be playfully in contact with other and earlier writing, moments when source and influence take on something approaching their etymological liquidity. To do so, we need to follow Coleridge’s image of the tank and rills, as he did in the Lay Sermon of 1817, not only into different writings but different discourses: into what he called ‘the Ideal of a beneficent and judicious system of Finance’. Comparing the circulation of water in a cultivated garden with that of currency in an economy, Coleridge developed his analogy: ‘tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation: while the hundred rills hourly varying their channels and directions . . . would give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population.’44 The state of the nation’s currency occupied Coleridge alongside Ben Jonson in 1811: it forms a vital context for the two poems he published in The Courier.

II In May 1811, the House of Commons discussed and rejected the conclusions of Francis Horner’s select committee report into ‘the High Price of Gold Bullion’ and ‘the state of the Circulating medium and of the Exchanges’. The findings of the Bullion Committee’s report—that the value of paper currency could only be kept from depreciation by a restriction of its quantity when, as was the case after the suspension of 1797, it could no longer be exchanged for coin—and its rejected recommendations—that the country reinstate cash payments—started a debate that rumbled on through the summer of 1811, its aftermath set against the background of the continuing wars against Napoleon.45 The issues raised by the question of currency much exercised Coleridge 44 S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 157. 45 I quote the report’s title from Edwin Cannan, The Paper Pound of 1797–1821 (London: P. S. King, 1919), 3; earlier contexts for the debate are usefully defined in John Clapham, The Bank of England: A History, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), ii. 20–35, and T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (London: Methuen, 1955), 167–200.

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over the summer, and he returned regularly to discuss them in the pages of The Courier between May and August. This period, in which the bullionist case was rejected by the House, immediately precedes the publication, again in The Courier, of two lyrics adapted from Jonson, in both cases lightly retitled: ‘The Hour-Glass’ (published on 30 August) and ‘Mutual Passion’ (21 September). Both lyrics offer themselves to the understanding through Coleridge’s writing on the bullion question and paper currency from earlier in the year. The year 1811 saw the publication of the fourth edition of David Ricardo’s pamphlet, The High Price of Bullion, A Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes, and the first edition of his Reply to Mr. Bosanquet’s Practical Observations on the Report of the Bullion Committee. The two publications marked the culmination of Ricardo’s long-running critique of paper money, a critique that itself reached back at least as far as the distrust of bank notes powerfully witnessed by Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790. Both writers feared the evaporation of value that attended the depreciation of paper currency. Burke, disturbed by the alacrity with which the French assignats had replaced specie, mocked ‘the great machine, or paper-mill’ of France’s ‘fictitious wealth’, and its reliance on the ‘fraudulent circulation’ of ‘depreciated paper’. The paper currency, Burke wrote, marked the dim apogee of the Revolutionary innovations in France: ‘to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind’.46 Silver and gold, ‘the two great recognized species’ of Burke’s account, were no longer the substance for which paper money could be exchanged: rather, as paper money ceased to represent them, it simply replaced them; as the value of the assignats ceased to be one guaranteed by substitution, nothing then served to guard them against depreciation. Ricardo, two decades later, saw in the suspension of English cash payments a failure of vigilance against just such depreciation:

46 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39, 48; see further Tom Furniss, ‘Burke, Paine, and the Language of Assignats’, Yearbook of English Studies, 19 (1989), 54–70; and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in his Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 193–212.

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Parliament, by restricting the Bank from paying in specie, have enabled the conductors of that concern to increase or decrease at pleasure the quantity and amount of their notes; and the previously existing checks against an over-issue having been thereby removed, those conductors have acquired the power of increasing or decreasing the value of the paper currency.

In times of restriction, Ricardo argued, when paper money is not convertible back into the bullion-derived specie that it represents, there can be ‘no limit to the depreciation which may arise from a constantly increasing quantity of paper’, as the mint and market price of bullion grow apart.47 The textual consequences of paper money are therefore volatile and possibly dangerous. In his discussion of ‘The Discourse of Debt’, Peter de Bolla puts the matter more provocatively: paper money, he writes, ‘places enormous power in the authority of the pen and the act of writing or inscribing: it states, at its margin, that one may write money’.48 But what one may write, as Coleridge realized, may also be forged. Where does value reside in a textual currency whose integrity is threatened by depreciation, on the one hand, and by forgery, on the other? Right from their first use at the close of the seventeenth century, notes issued by the Bank of England were bounded by the fear of forgery: the earliest surviving proofs of the Bank’s promissory notes for Running Cash were never issued, as the records of the Court of Directors noted, due to their ‘being considered liable to be counterfeited’.49 Despite improvements in the printing of notes that, at the start of the nineteenth century, had seen the number of forgeries detected fall as low as 3,000 in 1803, the start of the century’s second decade saw a huge increase in forgeries, their number reaching 9,000 in 1811 and doubling to 18,000 in 1812. One reason for this rise in forged notes, and the related but not coincident rise in their detection, was precisely the suspension of cash payments in 1797, a move that necessitated the issue of notes for £1 and £2, where previously the lowest-denomination note had been restricted by Act of Parliament

47 David Ricardo, The High Price of Bullion, A Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes (1810), in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa and M. H. Dobb, 11 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, 1951–73), iii. 75, 78. 48 Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 103–40. 49 Quoted in A. D. Mackenzie, The Bank of England Note: A History of its Printing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 6, to which I am heavily indebted in the remainder of this paragraph, esp. 47–78.

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to £5.50 This large issue of notes obliged the bank’s Court of Directors to appoint six clerks to assist the cashiers by signing the new notes; it also prompted a sustained period of technical development in the printing of the notes, a development that had as its aim what the standard history of their printing calls ‘the inimitable note’. At the same time, the smaller-denomination notes were now used in transactions of much smaller values and between parties who had not had long experience of dealing in currency other than specie. As we shall see from The Courier, the twinned questions of value and forgery are at the centre of Coleridge’s engagement with Jonson. A footnote in Charles Lamb’s Specimens (1808) had offered an odd, Jonsonian account of this ongoing debate between bullion, coin, and paper money. Under the heading ‘Jaques (a Miser) worships his Gold’, Lamb printed a substantial extract from The Case is Altered in which Jonson’s miser buries his gold with the help of what the quarto’s stage directions specify as ‘a scuttle full of horse-dung’. Jaques is obsessed by the smell of gold and the sight of it; Lamb’s long note to the passage dwells on its touch: ‘The substitution of a thin unsatisfying medium for the good old tangible gold, has made avarice quite a Platonic affection in the comparison of the seeing, touching, and handling-pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A banknote can no more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion, than Creusa could return her husband’s embraces in the shades.’51 Coleridge, as we saw in Chapter 3, was an early reader of Lamb’s Specimens, but in the matter of ‘the seeing, touching, and handling-pleasures’ of gold he differed from his friend: for Coleridge, the value of money came not in its hoarding but was, rather, created by its circulation. In a late annotation to John Taylor’s anonymously published An Essay on Money (1830), Coleridge restated the thinking and the lexicon that had underwritten his defence of paper currency against the bullionist argument some twenty years previously. Commenting on Taylor’s discussion of the availability of currency, he observed: this does not in the least weaken my conviction as to the illegitimacy of bullionmoney—i.e. the confusion of the representant and represented. The perfection of Money is ideality—or where the Medium, the circulating Word, is in itself, like the Air of which the Word materially consists, below any calculable value. The hitherto unsolved problem, the desiderium ingens, of the Social state is an 50

Compare Ashton, Economic History, 186–8. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (London: Longman et al., 1808), 299, following The Case is Altered, iii. v. 4–26. 51

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unforgeable Medium. This attained, Paper would approach the perfection of the Idea.52

For Coleridge, ‘the circulating Word’—like the circulating currency— creates value precisely in the act of exchange; unlike the miser, who holds his value alone, Coleridge’s mind was attracted by the perfection of circulation. The continuities are strong between Coleridge’s late annotation and his journalism of the late spring and summer of 1811.53 In The Courier, Coleridge had offered a definition of money as that which ‘has a value among men according to what it represents, rather than to what it is’.54 In later articles addressing the issue, he elaborated on his notion of money as a ‘circulating medium’, and argued strongly that ‘the distinction between money and commodity, the representative and the thing represented, is not verbal or arbitrary, but real and of practical importance’.55 None the less, despite a long run of articles ostensibly offering resolution to the problem, Coleridge’s comments tend to demonstrate the spirit of his early determination ‘to defer our observations till such a time as the question had received a full parliamentary discussion’ (ii. 126). They tend, that is, to the promissory.56 Contemporary questions of authenticity and of value, then, always attend on Coleridge’s economic thinking in this period; his journalism in The Courier locates itself squarely within a recognizable matrix of historical concerns.57 On 22 August 1811, eight days before the publication of Coleridge’s ‘The Hour-Glass’, The Courier carried a report headed ‘Fictitious Bank Notes’, an account of the trial of a man charged by his landlady ‘with putting off to her one of the papers denominated

52 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, v. 686; incorporating the emendation of Coleridge’s ‘STALE’ to ‘STATE’. 53 Coleridge also adopts the distinction between ‘banknotes’ and ‘bullion’ in late marginalia (post-1830) to Robert Vaughan, The Life and Opinions of John de Wycliffe (1828) to represent ‘Church doctrines’ and ‘scripture’ (Marginalia, vi. 19–20). 54 The Courier, 9 May 1811: Essays on his Times in ‘The Morning Post’ and ‘The Courier’, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), ii. 132; Coleridge quoted his own definition on 2 Aug. (ii. 239). 55 9 May and 2 Aug. 1811 (ii. 133, 239). 56 Coleridge addressed the question of currency on 6, 7, and 9 May; 5, 6, 10, and 20 July; 2 and 13 Aug. 1811. The articles of 5, 6, and 10 July were probably collaborative (Essays, iii. 116–17). 57 On Coleridge’s relations to economic discourse more largely in the period see Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 127–60.

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flash notes, as a Bank of England note for five pounds’.58 There is an important overlap between the subheading and Coleridge’s terminology here, itself shaded with memories of Burke on the ‘fictitious’ wealth of France: Coleridge had reflected, on 20 July, that ‘there is not real scarcity of gold in the common market, and only a fictitious scarcity in Great Britain’.59 As the report in The Courier relates, what began as a request for change stood more largely for the kinds of exchanges of which an economy is compounded. The accused, so it was argued, had asked his landlady, Mrs Hill, to break a pound note, but once having received the twenty shillings from her had only, in fact, a £5 note; this she later took from him, offering to get it changed. Her offer was accepted—she received the note, and took it to a neighbouring coal-dealer, who gave her five small notes for it, four of which she gave to the prisoner. The person who changed it for her gave it in payment to his baker, who again paid it away to his flour-factor, and this latter to another person, who detected the cheat—and on Saturday morning last, after more than a fortnight had elapsed, the note was returned to Mrs. Hill.

Asked by the court where he had first obtained the note, the prisoner replied that he had been given it on the road between Greenwich and London, his trade being the peripatetic sale of pamphlets and periodical publications. Finally, the trial was adjourned and the prisoner remanded (in the words of the report) ‘till all the parties through whose hands the note had passed should be able to attend’. The text at the centre of this case, the fictitious or flash note, was discussed in court, and is described in detail by The Courier: The note was produced, and was a close imitation of a Bank of England note, except its being made payable ‘‘to Mr. Abraham Latitat or Bearer,’’ and signed for the ‘‘Governor and Company of the Bank in England’’—Abraham Latitat being placed under the number in a manner similar to the words Henry Hase in the Bank of England notes, and the word in being defaced as if by accident. The letter P was placed before the word five, but was torn off so as to leave only the bottom of the letter, which at first sight resembled the bottom part of the letter L.

58 The Courier, 22 Aug. 1811, p. 3. ‘Flash’ in the sense of ‘Counterfeit, not genuine, sham’ (adj. 3.2) marginally antedates OED’s earliest citation (The Sporting Magazine, 1812). 59 Essays, ii. 230; in 1834, C. V. Le Grice, Coleridge college friend, recalled his undergraduate familiarity with Burke’s writings: ‘There was no need of having the book before us. Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim’ (quoted in Ralph Pite, ed., Lives of the Great Romantics: Coleridge (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), 85).

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One name substituted for another, ‘in’ substituted for ‘of’: they are small changes, but tell more largely of the way in which the text of a banknote is susceptible of imitation and adaptation to an extent that is, finally, uncontrollable; a system that depends on similarity (all notes must look alike, and be scripted identically) is open to abuse by copying, and more particularly by such alteration as preserves still an appearance of the original.60 Even at the most basic level of the alpha-numeric coding of the notes, individual letters are not without complication: Ps can look like Ls, the vestiges of one piece of type resemble another, with no small consequence. Names too, as Henry Hase makes clear, become unclear in the textual haze. The circulation of such texts, the transmission of such notes through an economy, is not regular and does not admit readily of regulation: apparently first accepted in payment for another printed text (a pamphlet), and then moving from landlady to coal-dealer, and on from baker to flour-factor, the progress of the note can be tracked, but not in any substantial way controlled. The transmission of a banknote, as we are continuing to learn of the transmission of literary texts, is not so easily detailed.61 There are two related contexts that might usefully be separated here. The first, the historicized horizon of concerns and events in which Coleridge’s poetic and journalistic texts appeared, offers a context in which this writing offers to be read: an ongoing debate as to the nature of money as a representational system, distinct from the material commodities of which it was fashioned. This debate stands as a sharp analogue to the concerns of a writing practice which (as we will see) has everything to do with the reworking, adaptation, and revision of earlier, circulating texts. The two lyrics which Coleridge printed in The Courier might be thought of in relation to Jonson’s ‘originals’ in something like the relation of paper currency to the bullion for which it stands and which, notionally, underwrites its value. Coleridge’s texts remain in a substitutive relation with Jonson’s as, at the same time, they also begin to circulate freely, according to their own dynamics and rules. Their value, created partly by their substitutive relation to Jonson, also exists independently of Jonson. And it is in the freedom of this independent 60 A facsimile of a genuine Hase note is provided in Vincent Duggleby, English Paper Money (London: Gibbons, 1975), 36; Hase’s predecessor as Chief Cashier had been Abraham Newland. 61 Compare Random Clod on a text’s ‘ ‘‘transformission’’—how it was transformed as it was transmitted. (And since we don’t have texts that aren’t transmitted, transformission should cover most everything.)’, in his ‘Information on Information’, TEXT, 5 (1991), 241–81.

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circulation that the second context is most clearly seen: not the economic and political concerns that dominated public debate but that irreducible textuality described by Jerome McGann. Both the practice and the study of human culture comprise a network of symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges always involve material negotiations. Even in their most complex and advanced forms—when the negotiations are carried out as textual events—the intercourse that is being human is materially executed: as spoken texts or scripted forms. To participate in these exchanges is to have entered what I wish to call here ‘the textual condition’.62

Clearly the two contexts—sharing as they do a common vocabulary of exchange and negotiation—are not, finally, discrete. For the moment at which paper currency replaces, or, more accurately, becomes irreplaceable by, gold or specie might be thought of as the very moment at which currency becomes a kind of text, when the exchanges it facilitates are most closely akin to textuality. The case reported by The Courier confirms that printed paper can be reproduced far more readily, and far more disconcertingly, than metal coin could ever be—whether that reproduction be fraudulent, as was alleged in the court case, or illadvised, as it was held to be by economic critics of the government, which was printing currency in advance of the rate at which it could notionally be exchanged for bullion. This territory, both financial and literary, is bounded by the anxieties of forgery, imitation, and value: as Cobbett wrote triumphantly a decade later in The Political Register, ‘They can make nothing that cannot be imitated.’63 Coleridge brought the two senses together in a Notebook entry of early summer 1805, asking the question that I now want to address: ‘Schiller disgusted with Kotzebueisms deserts from Shakspere. What? cannot we condemn a counterfeit, & yet remain admirers of the Original?’64

III Coleridge printed two poems in The Courier on 30 August 1811: one, ‘The Virgin’s Cradle-Hymn’, was a translation of a medieval Latin 62 Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Textual Condition’, in The Textual Condition (Princeton,: Princeton University Press, 1991), 88–98. 63 Political Register, 35 (1819–20); cited by Kevin Gilmartin, ‘Popular Radicalism and the Public Sphere’, Studies in Romanticism, 33 (1994), 549–57. 64 S. T. Coleridge, Notebooks, ii. 2598 (May–June 1805).

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lyric; the other, ‘The Hour-Glass’, was an adaptation of Jonson’s ‘The Houre-Glass’ (Und. 8). ‘The Virgin’s Cradle-Hymn’, a poem first translated by Coleridge in 1799 and subsequently published in The Morning Post (December 1801), was gathered in Sibylline Leaves (1817); ‘The HourGlass’, never printed before by Coleridge, was never printed again by him during his lifetime. Not until Mays’s edition have the two poems formed part of the same sequence in Coleridge’s work: in Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s long standard two-volume Oxford edition, ‘The Virgin’s Cradle-Hymn’ appeared in the main chronological sequence, while ‘The Hour-Glass’ was relegated to the fifth of six appendices among other ‘Adaptations’.65 One poem, which Coleridge called in 1811 an ‘English Imitation’, was promoted to a place among his achieved poetry; another, about whose origins he chose to remain silent, was shuffled off to the back of the book. Mays has commented valuably on the wider instances and effects of such an evaluative hierarchy.66 But the thinking that has, since their first publication, separated the two poems, ‘translation’ from ‘adaptation’, will repay further attention. ‘The Hour-Glass’, as it was first printed in The Courier, stands as a contrast to the delicately observed scene of mother and child in ‘The Virgin’s Cradle-Hymn’. This poem is not maternal but amatory: O think, fair Maid! these sands, that pass In slender threads adown this glass, Were once the Body of some swain, Who lov’d too well and lov’d in vain. And let one soft sigh heave thy breast, That not in life alone unblest E’en Lovers’ ashes find no rest.67

But if ‘rest’ is what the poem’s lovers lack, then so too is the poem itself textually restless. Robert Anderson’s A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, in which Coleridge encountered Jonson’s lyric, offered not a single poem but one that was itself radically versional. Besides Jonson’s eleven-line poem, printed in The Underwood as ‘On a Lover’s Dust, made Sand for an Hour-glass’, Anderson offered in a note a nine-line poem, ‘On a Gentlewoman Working by an Hour-glass’, from Benson’s 1640 duodecimo and quarto editions of Jonson’s poems; and behind 65 The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 417–18, 1119–20. 66 ‘Coleridge’s New Poetry’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 94 (1997), 127–56. 67 I follow, as does Mays, The Courier (i. 893), but correct (as he does not) the ungrammatical ‘Lover’s’ to ‘Lovers’, following Ernest Hartley Coleridge ([ii]. 1120).

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these he also printed, ‘from the Latin of Jerome Amaltheus’, a six-line lyric, ‘Horologium pulverum, tumulus Alcippi’.68 Sifting the relation of Coleridge’s poem to its two Jonsonian and one Latin ‘originals’ becomes intensely problematic: as the poem is itself concerned with process and exchange, so does later adaptation and appropriation by Coleridge continue that ongoing circulation.69 Yet these were complications of a kind of which Coleridge was well aware, and well aware in connection with Jonson especially. In Wordsworth’s copy of Joseph Ritson’s A Select Collection of English Songs (1783), which he likely read in the years preceding his contributions to The Courier, Coleridge took exception to the comment made by Ritson of Jonson’s ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’. To Ritson’s appreciative purr—‘of the following song . . . Anacreon, had Anacreon written in English, need not have been ashamed’—Coleridge replied in tones of incredulity: ‘Was Ritson ignorant that this is a mere Translation of a Greek Epigramma, or more probably, Scolion?’70 As in the example on which Coleridge here comments, the texts of which his ‘Hour-Glass’ is compounded, the residues of speech and experience that thread through it, are multiple and diffuse. For in addition to the voices so far discussed it contains the voice of another lover in its fourth line, another faint echo in the glass. The voice is Othello’s, his injunction ‘Then must you speak | Of one that loved not wisely, but too well’ (v. ii. 352–3). An imitation of a translated original, Coleridge’s poem is haunted by voices other than its own—those of Amalteo, Jonson, and Othello; restlessly concerned with the flow of other lives, loves, and voices, its circulating words become a meditation on the persistence of literary memory. Well, one might ask (as others have done): what does it matter who is speaking?71 In verse such as Coleridge printed in The Courier, the need 68 Robert Anderson, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, 14 vols. (London: John & Arthur Arch et al., 1793–1807), iv. 563; Anderson’s note compresses 1756, vi. 353–4, in which Peter Whalley first noticed the connections. 69 Jonson’s poem had earlier a large seventeenth-century circulation in manuscript: Peter Beal’s Index lists thirty-seven other surviving texts of the poem besides the autograph presented by Jonson to Drummond, now Scottish Record Office, GD18/4312 (Index of English Literary Manuscripts, i: 1450–1625, 2 pts. (London: Mansell, 1980), facsimile 22 (ii. 237) ). 70 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 291; the annotation probably dates between Sept. 1808 and Mar. 1810 (iv. 289). ‘Scolion’ is Coleridge’s transliteration of the Greek scholion, an ‘explanatory note or comment; . . . an ancient exegetical note or comment upon a passage in a Greek or Latin author’ (OED, scholium). 71 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 101–20.

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for an adequate response is more urgent than elsewhere: it is a poetry that creates personae who are necessarily separate from the poet, but creates them from the voices and writings of others—a poetry where ‘I’ is never simple, but compounded of and from the many: a poetry that is not personal but textual, intertextual even. And the question is important not only for this reason: the newspaper in which the poems were first published, produced by a team of collaborators, is itself a compounded production, its columns filled with the different styles of different writers whose identities (in The Courier at least) are not given. Anonymity, though perhaps no more than a product of house style, produces other effects: a textual environment where voice is plural. The process of sifting, attention, and attribution lying behind David Erdman’s edition of Coleridge’s journalism from The Morning Post and The Courier is only one register of this compounded voice.72 Elsewhere, Harold Love has written perceptively of the problems of attribution and origin posed by periodical publication;73 while Zachary Leader has explored the ‘Uses of Journalism’ and its paradoxically ‘liberating constraints and contingencies’, drawn on by Coleridge throughout his career.74 Jerome McGann, too, has paid illuminating attention to the locations of Keats’s early publication in The Indicator, and the political, historical, textual, and bibliographical effects that are created by such ‘specifically pertinent contexts’.75 And it is the pertinence of Coleridge’s ‘Mutual Passion’ to which I now turn. ‘Altered and Modernized from an Old Poet’, the five stanzas of Coleridge’s ‘Mutual Passion’ were printed in The Courier on 21 September 1811, set apparently inconsequentially between the previous night’s opera review and news of the duke of York; the poem was afterwards printed in the first, London gathering of Sibylline Leaves in 1817.76 That the information offered by the poem’s subtitle was long disregarded is 72

S. T. Coleridge, Essays, i. pp. xxvii–xxxii. Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2, 55–9. 74 Zachary Leader, ‘Coleridge and the Uses of Journalism’, in Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennett, eds., Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 22–40. 75 Jerome J. McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, in his The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 18–65. 76 Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), pp. ix–x. On the printing of Sibylline Leaves see Mary Lynn Johnson, ‘How Rare is a ‘‘Unique Annotated Copy’’ of Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves?’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1975), 451–81; and Poetical Works, ed. Mays, i. 890–92. 73

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entirely consistent with the reticence which is the text’s primary discursive mode: ‘Mutual Passion’ is a poem concerned not with telling, but with concealment, as it is aware of what such a withholding denies. I love, and he loves me again, Yet dare I not tell who: For if the nymphs should know my swain, I fear they’d love him too. Yet while my joy’s unknown, Its rosy buds are but half-blown: What no one with me shares, seems scarce my own.77

The first four lines of this stanza are identical with those spoken by Jonson’s Nymph; but where Coleridge’s lines turn aside from their original in the final triplet, they remain still entranced by the doubleness of sharing. Jonson’s stanza had concluded ‘For that’s a narrow joy is but our owne’; Coleridge’s line is broader, but less securely in command of the paradoxically single mutuality of Jonson’s ‘our owne’, for which it can substitute only a sibilant, insecure grasp: ‘What no one with me shares, seems scarce my own.’ But that ‘own’ is of course shared: Coleridge, as well as preserving the rhyme sound of the triplet, carries over the first and third of Jonson’s rhyme words, altering only Jonson’s unsettled, half-rhyming ‘none’ in line 6 for ‘half-blown’. ‘Mutual Passion’ shares too the tripping, accelerating progression from trimeter to tetrameter to pentameter that speeds the poem along and through the strengthening lines to the conclusion of line 7, introduced (in Coleridge) by the confirmatory colon—a lengthening of the line that is simultaneously a withholding and a progressive delaying of the chiming, locked-up rhyme. But there are other sharings too. Coleridge first published ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree’ in 1828, but it had been written as long ago as 1805 in the Mediterranean heat of Malta. Nor had the intervening years been kind to the poem: as the 1828 prefatory note made clear, this was a recovered text, a ‘rude draught’ of a lost original. ‘The first leaf of the MS. from which the poem has been transcribed, and which contained the two or three introductory stanzas, is wanting; and the author has in vain taxed his memory to repair the loss’ (i. 810). But from amidst the rapt prose of Coleridge’s reconstructed first stanza two lines of verse 77 I follow (as does Mays) The Courier; but correct (as he does not) ‘It’s’ to ‘Its’ in line 6, following Sibylline Leaves (1817).

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do ring out. The second line which the poem retrieves enacts its own chiasmic, amatory doublings in recalling the memory of an individual the poem calls ‘a ONE’: ‘The best belov’d, who loveth me the best’. But it is the first line of verse whose doubleness is uncanny: What no one with us shares, seems scarce our own.

I do not know that the connection between this fragmentary Malta poem and ‘Mutual Passion’ has ever been noticed in criticism. Nevertheless, the process by which the line came to appear in both poems is not clear: the double moment of composition—a draft of 1805, subsequently lost and repaired at some time before 1828—does not allow of certainty as to whether the line existed first in the original draft of ‘Blossoming’ or whether it is a retrospective addition to that draft, engrafted there from Coleridge’s memory of the ‘Mutual Passion’ of 1811. Origin is again uncertain; the stages through which the poem passed are impossible to reconstruct with any certainty, the witnesses to the line’s transmission difficult to assemble. As are the altered pronouns of the ‘Solitary’ poem troubling, demanding of interrogation: by what rationale might one account for ‘me’ and ‘my’ in a poem of ‘Mutual Passion’, and ‘us’ and ‘our’ in a poem dominated by ‘the ache of solitariness’? Yet, as printed in 1828, ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree’ is most alive when it is imagining community: even as he offers the prose reconstruction of the poem as ‘a substitute’ for the now lost original, Coleridge imagines that ‘some congenial spirit, whose years do not exceed those of the author at the time the poem was written, may find a pleasure in restoring the Lament to its original integrity by a reduction of the thoughts to the requisite Metre’ (i. 810). It is a forlorn, if endearing thought. But such congeniality might nevertheless properly be said to characterize ‘Mutual Passion’, as its lines entice and twine around Jonson’s. The poem is contrastively aware of the extent to which such enticements are not without their cautions: what had been at the close of Jonson’s poem a sense of contradiction, ‘love or fear’, is altered by Coleridge into a more complicated, more conflicting apprehension of ‘love’s strong fears’. Coleridge’s poem flirts with the discovery of its allusive origins as its speaker remains ever on the cusp of revelation: the awareness of discovery that Jonson gives to the nymph Yet, yet I doubt he is not knowne, And feare much more, that more of him be showne

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is in Coleridge’s speaker a yet more hesitating mode of display: Yet, yet I doubt, he is not known, Yet, yet I fear to have him fully shewn.

Repeated delay becomes here a mode of allusive poetics that teases with an eroticized, imitative indebtedness: each withdrawing revelation, each withheld acceleration, an offer to those who might hear back through Coleridge’s lines to their original—an offer which is each time retracted. The lines which Coleridge recasts from Jonson figure the very source of the two poems’ delighted mutual attention, that hearing of one another which is as enraptured as it is hesitant, lest the communion should be broken. And not the least remarkable feature of this communion is that the two poets should be in conversation through a female voice. To read ‘Mutual Passion’ as it asks to be read is to be returned to, or rather, proleptically to be imagined in, McGann’s textual condition, that emblematically cruel April in which it becomes impossible to tell what a text knows even about itself, and where I and I refuse ever to coalesce. It is a condition of textuality in which, in McGann’s formulation, poems are resistant in ways that speak directly to the texture of ‘Mutual Passion’: The resistance appears as the work’s patent designs of self-attention, the many ways it turns into itself (in both senses of ‘into’). Textual scholars register these forms of self-attention as the inseparability of the medium and the message, the advent of meaning as a material event which is coterminous (in several senses) with its textual execution. Literary works do not know themselves, and cannot be known, apart from their specific modes of existence/resistance. They are not channels of transmission, they are particular forms of transmissive interaction.78

There is much in McGann’s work that chimes with Coleridge’s poem: the inward-turning self-scrutiny of the persona and her poem, which is also a turning into, in the stronger sense of becoming, as the voice creates the text; the importance of the bibliographical context of The Courier for the poem’s meanings; the peculiar aptness of McGann’s attention to a text’s (lack of ) self-knowledge for a poem which has occasion not only to dwell but to rhyme on what is known and shown throughout; and the ‘transmissive interaction’ (never a more accurate phrase than here) that Coleridge’s poem maintains with Jonson. But ‘Mutual Passion’ offers also a means of complicating McGann’s formulations. For Coleridge’s poem does not have its meaning alone, is 78 For April, see ‘The Textual Condition’, in The Textual Condition, 88–98; for ‘resistance’, ‘Introduction’, 11.

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not (in a charged phrase) textually ‘solitary’: it has its meaning in relation to the poem of the previous month, ‘The Hour-Glass’, drawn from an adjacent poem in The Underwood; in relation to the reconstructed integrity of the poem written in Malta, which it anticipates, perhaps answers, and with which it has community; and meaning, too, in relation to Jonson’s poem. It is a meaning constructed in difference as it is equally forged from similarity, in confluence: poetic voices coming together in the strongest sense of coincidence. And what of The Courier on 21 September 1811? For ‘Mutual Passion’ was not the only piece of Coleridge’s writing to be printed that day: on the facing verso of the centre opening of the paper, he was concerned, not with telling, but with listening. ‘SIR,’ he began, ‘It has been remarked by the celebrated Haller, that we are deaf while we are yawning. The same act of drowsiness that stretches open our mouths, closes our ears. It is much the same in acts of the understanding. A lazy half-attention amounts to a mental yawn.’ This is writing which must seem almost arch when placed against such poetry as ‘Mutual Passion’: it challenges the reader not only to listen but to direct at the page an understanding and attention for which closed ears do not suffice. Coleridge’s subject was ostensibly ‘The Catholic Petition’, but he asked something else of his readers, challenged them to discern the mutuality of his prose journalism with his anonymous poetic mode. He continued: Where then a subject, that demands thought, has been thoughtfully treated, and with an exact and patient derivation from its principles, we must be willing to exert a portion of the same effort, and to think with the author, or the author will have thought in vain for us. It makes little difference for the time being, whether there be an hiatus oscitans [yawning gap] in the reader’s attention, or an hiatus lacrymabilis [lamentable gap] in the author’s manuscript. When this occurs during the perusal of a work of known authority and established fame, we honestly lay the fault on our own deficiency, or on the unfitness of our present mood; but when it is a contemporary production, over which we have been nodding, it is far more pleasant to pronounce it insufferably dull and obscure. Indeed, as charity begins at home, it would be unreasonable to expect that a reader should charge himself with lack of intellect, when the effect may be equally well accounted for by declaring the author unintelligible; or accuse his own inattention, when by half a dozen phrases of abuse, as ‘‘heavy stuff, metaphysical jargon,’’ &c. (which he may find ready made for him in any number of the Edinburgh Review) he can at once excuse his laziness, and gratify all his amiable passions of pride, scorn, and envy.79 79

S. T. Coleridge, Essays, ii. 305–6, whose translations I follow.

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It might be put like this: Coleridge’s two contributions to the day’s copy think with one another as, in ‘Mutual Passion’, he had thought with Jonson; the page in The Courier then figures the doubleness with which the poetry is concerned. It is not only that the poetry and the prose speak together, the ‘mutual passion’ of the poem with the ‘amiable passions’ of the prose, the ‘established fame’ of the prose with the ‘new fame’ of the poem. More importantly, there is exactly that doubleness of thought between the two pieces as Coleridge requires in his prose when he exhorts his readers ‘to think with the author’—thought which is not only ‘along with’ but carries also the stronger substantive sense of ‘use’. The contemporaneity with which the prose witnesses other works being dismissed by the critical establishment (the Edinburgh here standing in for the Quarterly as many other reviews) draws attention to just that riven temporality of ‘Mutual Passion’, that spoken present of the poem which slides between the print of 1811 and 1641, and between the composition printed in a known September and the unknown date of Jonson’s lyric. And the ‘laziness’ castigated by Coleridge demands that the poem be read with full attention: the seemingly unrelated but dazzlingly relevant article sharpens the apprehensions of the poetry to its own practices, and our apprehensions also: not only Coleridge hearing Jonson, but Coleridge hearing himself. If ‘Mutual Passion’ is a meditation on telling, Coleridge’s prose instructs his readers how to listen.

IV Two years almost to the day after the publication of ‘Mutual Passion’, Coleridge had occasion to wonder if he had been hearing things. Having caught that morning’s Morning Chronicle, he wrote to Daniel Stuart to remark that it contained ‘what I should have called a masterly Essay on the causes of the Downfall of the Comic Drama’—should, he continued, because he was ‘perplexed by the distinct recollection of having myself conversed the greater part of it at Lamb’s’. Puzzled, Coleridge proceeded to ask a second opinion: ‘I wish, you would read it; & tell me what you think. For I seem to remember a conversation with you, in which you asserted the very contrary.’ Speech and its origins, voices combining,

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circulating, and exchanging: the matter of the two poems of 1811 are here again Coleridge’s concerns, and are not unrelated to the letter’s postscript, which perhaps reveals more truly Coleridge’s reasons for writing to Stuart: P.S. There are some half dozen more of Books of mine left at the Courier office—Ben Jonson, & sundry German volumes—As I am compelled to sell my Library, you would oblige me by ordering the Porter to take them to 19, London Street, Fitzroy Square—whom I will remunerate for his Trouble.80

There is a world of fine embarrassment in the lines: Coleridge, as Jonson had been before him, compelled to devour his books for necessity, yet still solicitous for the porter’s troubles, offering, with the magnificent inappropriateness of better times in his voice, to ‘remunerate’ him.81 The edition of Jonson to which Coleridge referred has never been identified; nor has its loss been thought to damage our understanding of his reading relationship with Jonson. Possibly it was Lamb’s: Coleridge annotated Lamb’s copies of Donne and Beaumont and Fletcher in various states of physical distress over the period I have discussed in 1811; and other books were certainly used for journalism, Lamb writing on 7 June 1809 to tell him that ‘I fetch’d away my books which you had at the ‘‘Courier’’ Office’.82 Whichever edition of Jonson he had used in 1811, on 29 March 1815, as he proudly inscribed on the flyleaves of all four volumes, Coleridge, now resident in Calne, Wiltshire, with the Morgans, purchased for £4. 10. 0 John Stockdale’s edition of The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher (1811).83 It is to the impact of this purchase on Coleridge’s engagement with Jonson’s drama in the years after 1815 that I now turn. 80

Coleridge to Stuart, 25 Sept. 1813 (Collected Letters, iii. 441–2). Ibid.; the books were not sold but pawned (Collected Letters, iii. 455). 82 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ii. 243, i. 371; The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1935), ii. 75; Lamb’s unlocated copy of Jonson’s Works (1693) sold at Christie’s, New York, 14 Dec. 2000, lot 104 (The Book Collector, 50 (2001), 89). 83 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, iii. 170–95. 81

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Allusive Jonson, II: Coleridge, Southey, and Hartley Coleridge The previous chapter offered a discussion of Coleridge’s allusive and imitative relationships with Jonson in which I sought to relate the economics of contemporary currency debates to those more literary economies operating in his writing. In the workings and language of the bullion debate, I suggested, we are offered a new, alternative mode for understanding Coleridge’s allusive practice: rather than seeing allusion as having only to do with inheritance, we should be aware of other discourses with which it shares a language and a way of thinking. By reading onwards from Coleridge’s own sensitivities to the literary, allusive texture first of Osorio and later of Remorse, I suggested that in the lyrics adapted for The Courier in 1811 the circulating medium of a textual, written currency stood as an analogy to the practices of his poetry; contemporary concerns with imitation and forgery, I suggested, offer a larger context for Coleridge’s very local adaptations of Jonson. The benefits of such an approach are many: by relating Coleridge’s poetry and prose so closely, using the concerns of the one to illuminate the other, I hoped to offer not only a thoroughly historical reading of the two poems, but a reading that attended freshly to their origins and their originality; that reading was itself located within a larger network of Coleridge’s own sensitivities to the material texture of his writing. The present chapter seeks to expand this analysis by, first, offering a reading of a related economy and its writing: that of praise and dispraise, most particularly as they are brought to bear by the figure of the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. I argue that Southey, in his own Laureate writing more indebted to Jonson than has hitherto been appreciated, was also measured by Jonson’s personal and poetic example in politically hostile accounts of the Laureateship; and that, in turn, following the death of Queen Charlotte on 17 November 1818, Southey’s example spurred Coleridge to think again about the crucial relations of the writer and the state through the example of Jonson’s Catiline. In its closing section

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the chapter then returns to take up the model of the poet as heir in a discussion of Jonson’s presence in the writing of Coleridge’s eldest child, Hartley Coleridge, who, I suggest, came keenly to understand his own relationship with his father through Jonson’s poems of paternity. As my earlier discussion of Coleridge sought to complicate Ricks’s model, so here I seek to recover its importance for our understanding of Jonson’s Romantic relations.

I Robert Southey was created Poet Laureate in 1813. On 5 November he wrote to Walter Scott, who, by declining to put himself forward, had eased Southey’s path to the position, a letter busy with the details of his yesterday’s appointment. Rising early by candle-light, Southey told Scott, he had hurried to a meeting where he ‘swore to be a faithful servant to the King, to reveal all treasons which might come to my knowledge, to discharge the duties of my office, and to obey the Lord Chamberlain in all matters of the King’s service, and in his stead the Vice-Chamberlain.’ In return, Southey added, ‘I was thereby inducted into all the rights, privileges, and benefits’ which the previous incumbent, Henry James Pye, ‘did enjoy or ought to have enjoyed’.1 By a curious quirk, Pye was a descendant of the Sir Robert Pie so plaintively addressed by Jonson in the skipping skeltonics of ‘To Master John Burges’ (Und. 57).2 In that poem Jonson asked Pie, through Burges, a clerk in the exchequer, ‘To take Apprehension | Of a yeares Pension’ still unpaid, and later thirsted after ‘Wine to enable | The Muse, or the Poet’. The rights, privileges, and benefits—in cash and in kind—which so occupied Jonson also concerned Southey as he wrote to Scott, although, as he detailed his various remuneration, the new Laureate’s provident use of this income stands in sharp contrast to the earlier poet’s importunate improvidence: The original salary of the office was 100 marks. It was raised for Ben Jonson to 100l. and a tierce of Spanish canary wine, now wickedly commuted for 26l.; which said sum, unlike the canary, is subject to income-tax, land-tax, and heaven knows what taxes besides. The whole net income is little more or less than 90l. It 1 The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1849–50), iv. 48. 2 See H&S xi. 91.

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comes to me as a Godsend, and I have vested it in a life-policy: by making it up to 102l. it covers an insurance for 3000l. upon my own life.3

Much of Southey’s information concerning the history of the Laureate’s position had been unearthed by Edmond Malone in the Rolls Office during the summer of 1789; Malone’s letters to the then Laureate, Thomas Warton, after announcing the discovery of the patents appointing Jonson to the de facto office, are filled with enquiries, answers to which inform the discussion of the position which Malone printed in 1790.4 But although, as Southey, benefiting from this research, grudgingly notes, the financial rewards had (if anything) slightly decreased since Jonson held the office, its attendant political sensitivities had only increased. Southey’s political opponents were quick to see that Jonson stood in a more important (and more potentially embarrassing) relationship to the once radical new Laureate than that afforded, reductively, to him in Southey’s letter as the first poet to draw liquid as well as financial reward from the position. Leigh Hunt, first in September 1813 and again in January 1814, took up Jonson’s example as one with which to measure and to mock the new incumbent. In The Examiner on 26 September 1813, Hunt’s article on ‘The New Poet-Laureat’ followed hard upon two earlier articles, published on 15 and 29 August, in which, following the death of Henry James Pye, four days before the publication of the first piece, he had attacked the ‘absurd office’ of the Laureate: ‘an office’, he wrote, ‘which is paid for annually flattering the Prince to his face in so many set terms, whatever may be his merits or demerits, whatever his vanity or his modesty, whatever the beauty or the deformity of his public government’.5 Southey, the new Laureate, was claimed by Hunt to have renegotiated the terms of his appointment, so that he was not ‘obliged to write the regular panegyrical ode’ but could, at times of his own pleasing, ‘give them an effusion’. Besides the self-congratulatory preening attributed by Hunt to Southey lies a more literary charge of arrogance, as the new Laureate is imagined in self-reflective mood: ‘perhaps he may further exalt himself by comparisons of his poetry with 3

Southey, Life and Correspondence, iv. 49. Malone to Warton, 17 Aug. 1789: BL Add. MS 42561, fols. 208r –209v ; The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. David Fairer (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995); The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, ed. Edmond Malone, 10 vols. in 11 (London: J. Rivington et al., 1790), Ii, 399–401 n. 5 Leigh Hunt, ‘Office of Poet-Laureat’, The Examiner, 15 Aug. 1813, pp. 513–14; repr. in The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. Robert Morrison, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, et al., 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), i. 293–5. 4

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that of the Pyes and Eusdens,—to say nothing of the drydens and jonsons’.6 The typographical diminishment of Southey’s inglorious predecessors, ‘the Pyes and Eusdens’, in the face of their massive predecessors, ‘the drydens and jonsons’, situates the self-exalting Southey at the head of a narrowing pyramid of achievement. But if Dryden and Jonson serve here to belittle Southey’s literary prowess, they serve a different turn in Hunt’s response to ‘The New Year’s Ode’, published in The Examiner on 16 January 1814. Southey’s Carmen Triumphale, For the Commencement of the Year 1814 saw him, by Hunt’s account, ‘fallen into a vulgar mistake, which was not to be expected from a man of reading, still less from one who must have been looking about him to see what excuses he could find for himself in the names of his predecessors’. Hunt quoted Southey’s lines of confident announcement—‘In happy hour doth he receive | The laurel, meed of famous bards of yore, | Which Dryden and diviner Spenser wore’—and responded with unarguable fact and uncomfortable question: ‘Spenser was not Poet-Laureat;—the only poetical names, in the laureat-list, besides that of Dryden, are Davenant and Ben Jonson. Why did not Mr Southey chuse to mention these?’ The answer Hunt provides to his own question is simple: to the ‘consistency’ of Spenser are opposed the various inconsistencies of Dryden, ‘who changed his opinions more than once’; of Davenant, ‘a turn-coat as well as ladies’ man’; and of Jonson, not a turn-coat but ‘a drinker’. The political and religious apostasies of Dryden and Davenant (though, oddly, not precisely Jonson’s) figure Southey’s own political apostasy, from youthful radical to Quarterly Review-ing Laureate.7 But Jonson, as he is folded in with Dryden and Davenant, is also held apart from them: in a concessive parenthesis, Hunt allows that Davenant ‘had a spirit’, and that Jonson, more forcefully, ‘could say a bold thing even to Courts’. Hunt takes as his example of Jonson saying ‘a bold thing’ the dedication of Cynthia’s Revels ‘To the Special Fountain of Manners, The Court’. Jonson, having earlier drawn on Seneca’s equation 6 Leigh Hunt, ‘The New Poet-Laureat’, The Examiner, 26 Sept. 1813, pp. 609–11; repr. in Selected Writings, ed. Morrison et al., i. 296–300. 7 On this trajectory see David Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism’, English Historical Review, 104 (1989), 308–31; and the wider context provided by Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 138–54; Ian Donaldson discusses Jonson’s double change of faith in ‘Jonson’s Duplicity: The Catholic Years’, in his Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 47–65.

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of grace and reverence, there creates Elizabeth’s court in proper humanist fashion as both example and instruction, admonishing it to take seriously its responsibilities.8 In Hunt’s quotation (and with his emphasis), the Elizabethan mannerisms that Jonson then lightly deprecates take on a distinctly Regency fashion: It is not pould’ring, perfuming, and every day smelling of the taylor, that converteth to a beautiful object; but a mind shining through any sute, which needs no false light, either of riches, or honours, to helpe it.9

Cynthia’s Revels has recently been persuasively read by David Riggs as a failed bid on Jonson’s part for Elizabethan patronage;10 but by Hunt’s account, Jonson’s success was such that, were Southey searching for ‘good precedents for his laureat doings’, this Dedication, ‘to say nothing of its own beauty’, would serve him well.11 There is an ambivalence in Hunt’s use of Jonson’s example here: Jonson manifests, apparently at the same time, both the perils and the privileges of the Laureate’s position, being both subservient and independent, a literary model by which to denigrate Southey, yet also an instance of the moral laxity of Laureate verse. Hunt, that is, locates Jonson in contradictory fashion both as type and anti-type of the newly compromised Laureate Southey. A discussion of Southey’s Laureateship in The Champion (6 October 1816), though no less hostile than Hunt’s earlier articles, offered a sensitive analysis of the position’s difficulties: It is indeed, most melancholy, that Mr. Southey cannot have a glimmering of that which all the rest of the world see very plainly;—namely, that the office of Laureate is essentially and inevitably, without reference to persons or circumstances, a place of degradation and discredit. Praise, to be worth any thing, must be coupled with a freedom to disapprove:—the Poet Laureate has no such freedom,—consequently his praise, however merited, can reflect no credit on either the giver or the receiver. Eulogy being the only commodity in which he is permitted to deal, it loses all its value in his hands. The situation is, in it nature, one of tawdry and unmanly servitude,—own brother to the post of court fool, which for some other cause than that of possessing superior stamina, it has outlived. 8 Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, cxv. 3, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917–21), noted by H&S ix. 486. 9 Hunt quotes the ‘Dedication’ to Cynthia’s Revels, ll. 13–14; H&S notes a parallel in Disc. 1415–17 (ix. 486). 10 Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 69–72. 11 Hunt, ‘The New Year’s Ode’, The Examiner, 16 Jan. 1814, pp. 41–2; repr. in Selected Writings, i. 309–13.

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A position obtained by patronage is here understood financially: a paid office, the Laureate’s position is seen in terms of credit, discredit, and worth; the commodity in which the poet is obliged to deal, praise, is devalued by the very fact of its being bought. At once enforced and enfeebled, the Laureate’s participation in the economy of praise lacks entirely the freedom which The Champion so forcefully demonstrates: unable to trade in disapproval or criticism, the position is seen as one of servitude and subjection. To the place of Jonson in Coleridge and then Southey’s understanding of this complex of issues, and to the contradictions he embodies for them as well as for their opponents, this chapter now turns. How did Southey negotiate the self-positioning so gracefully achieved by Jonson? The notes of his reading, particularly in Jonson’s poetry, show him directing his thoughts precisely to such questions of the poet’s relation to his patron. When, following his death, Southey’s library was auctioned by Sotheby’s in May 1844, his set of Gifford’s Jonson, ‘9 vol. uncut’, sold for the modest amount of £2. 11. 0.12 The cataloguer’s uncut must here mean untrimmed rather than unopened, for the many entries in Southey’s commonplace books show him to have been a careful and consistent reader in Gifford’s edition of Jonson’s Works, and provide a record of his responses, even though Southey’s set remains unlocated. In this absence of Southey’s annotated set (if it still survives), the notes printed in his son-in-law, John Wood Warter’s four-volume edition of Southey’s Common-Place Book can offer only a partial account of his responses to Jonson, and one whose difficulties as a text therefore stand in need of consideration.13 The editorial procedures of Warter’s four volumes were and remain opaque, such that, in the absence of any detailed survey of Southey’s extant manuscript commonplace notes, the precise relation of the texts printed by Warter to the documents from which they derive must remain imprecise. That indeterminacy is matched by the differing statuses of many notes: as they were made for different purposes, and in response to different impetuses, so does their nature 12 The purchaser of Lot 1529 was Rodd: Catalogue of the Valuable Library of the Late Robert Southey, Esq. (London: Sotheby, 8 May 1844), in A. N. L. Munby, gen. ed., Sale Catalogues of the Libraries of Eminent Persons, 12 vols. (London: Mansell, 1971–95), ix; on the sale and Southey’s habits of collecting see Kenneth Curry, ‘The Library of Robert Southey’, in Studies in Honor of John C. Hodges and Alwin Thaler, Tennessee Studies in Literature, Special Number, 1961, 76–86. 13 Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Orme, 1849–51).

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differ also. The varieties of attention and form manifested in the notes require of us that we read the commonplace books openly, aware of the multiple differences within the text and that we read also without seeking, necessarily, to bring them into singleness or self-consistency.14 In this, the notes in their variety tend towards that category of ‘books which are no books—biblia a-biblia’, isolated by Charles Lamb, and in which he classed ‘Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statues at Large’.15 Fragmentary, and in some senses authored by Southey only as far as selection and transcription, the commonplace books further expand the variety of textual forms in which Jonson was mediated and responded to in the Romantic age.16 If Southey’s commonplace notes have kin in Lamb’s catalogue of unreadability, then his own practice as a reader and annotator can go some way towards informing our own reading of these texts. Southey’s practice was discussed by his son, Cuthbert Southey, who, in his edition of the Life & Correspondence, portrayed his father as a purposeful reader, whose commonplace books were a resource: He was as rapid a reader as could be conceived, having the power of perceiving by a glance down the page whether it contained anything which he was likely to make use of—a slip of paper lay on his desk, and was used as a marker, and with a slight pencilled S he would note the passage, put a reference on the paper, with some brief note of the subject, which he could transfer to his note-book, and in the course of a few hours he had classified and arranged everything in the work which it was likely he would ever want.17

This description of a pragmatic reading and writing practice—‘anything which he was likely to make us of’, ‘everything in the work which it was likely he would ever want’—cuts in two directions across Southey’s readerly encounters with Jonson: on the one hand, as I shall argue, the use to which Southey put his reading is clear and illuminating; 14 On these generic constraints more largely, see Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001). 15 Charles Lamb, ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, in Elia, Second Series (London: Edward Moxon, 1839), 45. 16 On such questions of ‘scribal authorship’ compare H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 15–16; and Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 119–21, 315. 17 Life and Correspondence, ed. C. C. Southey, vi. 17–18.

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on the other, the repeated, regular pattern of his reading suggests that Southey found in Jonson an author whose works, in their own variety, would not so easily render themselves to classification and arrangement as others.18 There is reason to think that the long consecutive series of notes made from eight of the nine volumes of Gifford’s edition must be among the earliest of Southey’s responses to Jonson printed by Wood Warter. The notes show Southey reading straight through from volume ii to volume ix of Gifford’s edition, commenting as he progressed not only on Jonson’s texts but on Gifford’s annotations also. Southey’s is involved, close, critical reading of both text and apparatus; and it is tempting to think that Southey’s interest was sparked not only by his own Laureateship but also by Gifford’s place as editor, not only of Jonson but of The Quarterly Review, to which Southey had first contributed in 1808. His readings of Jonson are themselves, as we shall see, political, and are thus conditioned by the political contexts of Southey’s literary relationship with Gifford. That the entries made in sequential response to volumes ii–ix of Gifford’s edition represent the only consecutive set of responses to Jonson argues for their being the record of a first encounter with the edition, the product of having sat down to read through a newly acquired set of books in the years immediately after publication in 1816. The evidence of those individual notebooks, like those from which Warter printed and to which a later date can definitely be assigned, tend to bear this hypothesis out. One such notebook, now in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, dates from the mid-1820s to the mid-1830s: it shows Southey reading in volume vi of Gifford’s edition, from which he makes notes on The Tale of a Tub, and in the text of Eastward Ho! reprinted in Dodsley’s collection of Old Plays.19 Another, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, dates from 18 On the larger political and intellectual continuities of this mode of reading see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘ ‘‘Studied for Action’’: How Gabriel Hardy Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78, and Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in W. Speed Hill, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 131–47. 19 The notebook is now Beinecke GEN MSS 298 vol. 2. The small, paginated, bound notebook is made up from various stocks of paper, ranging in date from 1818 to 1824; one entry, immediately following Southey’s references to Jonson on p. 178, is dated July 1833 (p. 180). I have not found any Jonsonian example of the kind of intermediate ‘brief note’, made on a separate piece of paper for later transfer to a notebook, as discussed by Cuthbert Southey, though those examples I have located suggest that Wood Warter might have disposed of them as literary souvenirs: one in the Brotherton Collection MS Gen q

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the early 1830s, and shows Southey reading in the first three volumes of Gifford’s edition, taking notes from Every Man Out, Cynthia’s Revels, Poetaster, and Sejanus.20 The two commonplace books do not, that is, give evidence of such a sustained reading in Jonson as is witnessed in the longer series of notes printed by Warter, but rather show Southey dipping in and out of Jonson’s works. These later readings, more locally conditioned and more confined by purpose rather than the extensive earlier reading, are themselves no less pragmatic. Though the entries in the Beinecke and Folger commonplace books testify to the continuance of Southey’s interest in Jonson over a period of many years, they do not, as the longer sequence printed by Warter does, speak so directly to the motives that lie behind his reading. Praise and dispraise are central in those responses to Jonson’s writing which Southey noted in his responses to Gifford’s edition, and in those responses most notable as they relate to the three collections of Jonson’s poetry—Epigrams, The Forest, and The Underwood —printed across volumes viii and ix. The keynote is sounded by the lines transcribed by Southey from Crites’s angry words of self-address in Cynthia’s Revels: Crites, Men speak ill of thee. So they be ill men, If they spake worse, ’twere better: for of such To be dispraised, is the most perfect praise. What can his censure hurt me, whom the world Hath censured vile before me!21

Crites’s words of self-address revalue dispraise into praise; they insulate him from hostile commentary within a world (the play suggests) of false confidence and self-regard. In Southey’s application of the speech we see the poet striving for self-definition not in the face of public attack but rather through it, reconciling himself by glorious precedent to his current reception. The arrogance of it, shorn of the ironies attendant on Jonson’s stage, is astonishing. Others of Southey’s notes are similarly linked. Moving from Tucca’s contention in Poetaster that Horace has ‘turn’d faun now’, Southey SOU, Leeds University Library, is endorsed on its verso ‘The hand-writing of the | late ‘Robert Southey’ | J. W. Warter, 28 Octr . 1871.’ 20 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS M.a.159, fols. 74r –79r , dated by an entry from ‘Times. Thursday 29. Sept. 1831’ on fol. 77r ; these notes were not printed by Warter. 21 1816, ii. 281; Southey’s Common-Place Book (henceforth CB), iv. 656: future references will be given in the text.

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builds on Gifford’s note (‘The writers of Jonson’s day seem to have connected, I know not why, the idea of a spy, or splenetic observer, with that of a faun’) to observe: ‘A faun or fawne, I suppose, is synonimous with a fawner’ (1816, iv. 490; CB iv. 325). Southey’s note is, at one level, simply a record of philological and historical curiosity, an interest in a word’s changing meanings; but at another, it locates his attention to Jonson securely within those areas of political and poetical dependence, praise and dispraise, marked out by his opponents. The same contextual attention also operates in the brief note made to volume vii of Gifford’s edition, in which Southey singles out the ‘Dedication of a Masque to P. Henry’ (CB iv. 326). The two notes, though thematically linked, are separated by numerous notes to the intervening volumes, notes which range from the personal (Southey notes that his friend Richard Heber ‘has an autograph MS. of the Masque of the Metamorphosed Gipsie’: iv. 326; it was the manuscript which Gifford had earlier borrowed) to the pointed (taking up the word ‘Bride-ale’ from Epicoene, Southey points to ‘a note showing that Gifford did not know what the word means’: iv. 325). But at the same time, Southey’s sensitivities outline a concern that comes to predominate in his reading of Jonson’s poetry. Take, for instance, the following three notes from the twenty-three in total made from volume viii of Gifford’s Jonson. The first, made in response to Epigram 65, ‘To My Muse’, notes Jonson’s ‘Repentance for some ill deserved eulogy’. The great turn at the centre of the collection, Epigram 65, sees the poet, after two poems in whole-hearted praise of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, look inward to question his own epideictic practice: Away, and leave me, thou thing most abhorr’d, That hast betray’d me to a worthless lord; Made me commit most fierce idolatry To a great image through thy luxury. (1816, viii. 186)

The epigram, though it finally resolves its own tensions (‘Whoe’er is raised, | For worth he has not, he is tax’d not praised’), shows Jonson writing out his own creative and personal freedom as he spins away, in self-questioning disgust, from the nameless ‘worthless lord’: Epigram 65, when read against the two poems to Cecil that precede it, is a negotiation of a position precisely analogous to that of the Laureate, committed to praise what might not reliably be praiseworthy. It precisely catches the sharp purchase of the definition of epigram offered by William Camden,

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Jonson’s one-time schoolteacher: ‘short and sweet poems framed to praise and dispraise’.22 Camden’s ‘framed’ covers and conveys a whole variety of artfulness. So too, when Southey turns to The Underwood, 14, ‘An Epistle to Master John Selden’, it is not to praise the poem’s humanist and humane learning but to note in Jonson an ‘Admission that he has overpraised some persons’ (CB iv. 327). Jonson’s poem, as Gifford noted, had first been printed in the first edition of Selden’s Titles of Honour (1614), and in it Jonson works hard to distinguish his own words of praise from those more casually offered in similar circumstances by other, less careful authors: We see before A many’ of books, even good judgements wound Themselves, through favouring that is there not found; But I to your’s far otherwise shall do, Not fly the crime, but the suspicion too: Though I confess (as every muse hath err’d, And mine not least) I have too oft preferr’d Men past their terms, and prais’d some names too much; But ’twas with purpose to have made them such. (1816, viii. 365)

There is much to admire in Jonson’s lines: the delicacy of the lineending as ‘judgements wound | Themselves’ turns from intransitive to transitive verb, from harm of others to self-harm; or the flicker of sense around having ‘preferr’d | Men past their terms’, the phrase being both a recognition that praise can inflate men’s worth beyond its truth through inappropriate or inexact vocabulary but also, and more damningly, that the poet, in praising men after they have fallen from favour, might ally himself to a man no longer in a position to aid or patronize him. Southey’s note, if it is less detailed in its admiration than this, shows him attending to the most tactful of Jonson’s negotiations of his relations with praise and dispraise. The third note from volume viii, that ‘Charles sent him £100 in his sickness, 1629’ (CB iv. 327), shows a keen interest on Southey’s part not so much in the praise as in its financial rewards; and it keeps company with two others made from volume ix in which Jonson is seen renegotiating 22 William Camden, Remains of a Greater Work Concerning Britain (1605), quoted in Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 646.

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his Laureate status under Charles. If he was reading Jonson, as appears likely, in the years between 1816 and 1820, Southey could not but have been aware that the Prince Regent, since 1811 ruling in place of his mentally lapsed father, would at some point become George IV; and the example of Jonson’s ‘Epistle Mendicant’ to the High Treasurer, Richard, Lord Weston (Und. 71; CB iv. 327) and ‘The Humble Petition of Poor Ben; To the Best of Monarchs, Masters, Men, King Charles’ (Und. 76; CB iv. 327) clearly struck home. For in noting the second poem in his commonplace book, Southey crucially applies a term to it that Jonson’s poem withholds: Southey describes the poem not as ‘Ben’s’ petition but as a ‘Laureate’s petition to King Charles’ (CB iv. 327). Jonson’s poem, as it contrasts the examples of Charles’s ‘royal father’ (and his ‘extension | Of a free poetic pension, | A large hundred marks annuity, | To be given me in gratuity’) with its hopes for the conversion of that annuity from ‘father’s marks’ to ‘your pounds’, is conscious throughout of the envy drawn to the pensioned poet, ‘the ratling pit-pat noise | Of the less poetic boys’ (Und. 76). It offered Southey, that is, a model not only of astutely negotiated political and financial dependence but also of poetic independence: a way of openly seeking preferment and payment while retaining that poetical right of self-assertion which Hunt taunted Southey with having abnegated. Jonson’s ‘Humble Petition’, with its quick, four-beat trochaic couplets perhaps also provided Southey with a more formal basis for being indebted to Jonson.23 Earlier, in his notes to volume v of Gifford’s edition, Southey had marked Jonson’s ‘Ode to Himself’, printed after the text of The New Inn, to whose theatrical failure it was a response, as offering formal instruction: ‘The metre in his Ode to himself (vol. 5, p. 442), a ten-lined stanza, is sufficiently varied by the different length of the lines, though the rhymes are in couplets’ (CB iv. 325). Can such moments, where one poet observes another’s craft and notes it, as if for future reference, be supported with examples where the learning is evident? To turn from this note to the ‘Funeral Song, For the Princess Charlotte of Wales’ that Southey wrote following Charlotte’s death on 6 November 1817 is to see, again in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, the

23 George Saintsbury comments on the association of the form with Jonson and the ‘Sons of Ben’ in his A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1906–10), iii. 324–5; the connection is not noticed by Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), who none the less comments on Jonson’s formal importance for the Romantic Ode (pp. 64–9).

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example of ‘a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson’.24 For the ‘Funeral Song’ manifests a complex and multiple indebtedness to Jonson (and particularly to Gifford’s Jonson) that has not previously been recognized. When Southey came to collect the ten volumes of his Poetical Works in 1837–8, he placed much of his Laureate verse in the second of two volumes that gather his ‘Juvenile and Minor Poems’.25 But the ‘Funeral Song’ sits securely at the edition’s climax in volume x, following Carmen Nuptiale, a poem written on Princess Charlotte’s marriage, and interrupting the sequence of the 1816 volume in which that poem had first been printed.26 In 1838, the tenth volume of Southey’s Poetical Works moves from the national military triumph commemorated in ‘The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ to the Carmen Nuptiale, and then through the darker notes of the ‘Funeral Song’ to A Vision of Judgement, darker still. Modulating the progress of the volume, the ‘Funeral Song’ does so with Jonson’s example in mind. Southey’s 149-line poem operates in a very different mode and mood from Jonson’s ‘Ode to Himself’, but the patterning of its rhymes, at least in its first two ten-line stanzas, shows Southey hearing and mediating the influence of Jonsonian metric and rhyming patterns. In volume viii of his edition, Gifford had printed as Jonson’s an ‘Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke’, first claimed for him by Peter Whalley in 1756; Gifford, inserting the poem in The Underwood, praised the ‘exquisite beauty of this little piece (the most perfect of its kind)’. The poem is now known not to be Jonson’s composition—it was written by William Browne, in whose hand an autograph text of the poem exists in BL Lansdowne MS 777, fol. 43v —but Gifford’s praise of the poem causes it to stand out.27 Gifford prints in the main body of his text only the first stanza of the poem, consigning the second to a note: Underneath this sable herse, Lies the subject of all verse, sidney’s sister, pembroke’s mother; Death! ere thou hast slain another, 24 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ben Jonson’, in his Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 147–60. 25 The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, 10 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1837–8), iii. 255–6. 26 Robert Southey, The Lay of the Laureate (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816). 27 The poem is Und. 15 in Gifford’s sequence; see further H&S ix. 433–4.

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Learn’d and fair, and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee. (1816, viii. 337–8)

The seven-syllable, trochaic lines of this funeral song—the line of Jonson’s ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair’ from Cynthia’s Revels—find their parallel in Southey’s ‘Funeral Song’, whose ten-line first stanza demonstrates a development of the rhyming pattern he had earlier identified in Jonson’s ‘Ode to Himself’: In its summer pride array’d, Low our Tree of Hope is laid! Low it lies: . . . in evil hour, Visiting the bridal bower, Death hath levell’d root and flower. Windsor, in thy sacred shade, (This the end of pomp and power!) Have the rites of death been paid: Windsor, in thy sacred shade Is the Flower of Brunswick laid! (ll. 1–10)

Southey has learned formally from Jonson. Southey’s final recourse, in the last four lines of the ‘Funeral Song’, to the herse/verse-line that had opened Browne’s poem, is perhaps simply conventional: One who reverently, for thee, Raised the strain of bridal verse, Flower of Brunswick! mournfully Lays a garland on thy herse.

But to do so in a verse-line learned from Jonson and his students, moves beyond the conventional. The ten-line stanza that begins his ‘Funeral Song’ does not vary its rhymes by line length but by setting triplets among its couplet rhymes; but the coincidence of its composition late in 1817 with Southey’s readings in Jonson supports the observation. The poem shows, that is, Southey thinking through even as he uses Jonson’s example, fusing the seven-syllable elegiac trochaic line that Browne had learned from Jonson with a development of Jonson’s ability to vary rhyme in his ‘Ode’. This assimilative and imitative mode in Southey’s writing struck Herman Merivale, an early reviewer of the Poetical Works, who drew an analogy between Southey and Jonson that was not, like many others,

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political, but poetic. Merivale reached for a contrast between Virgil and Jonson to approach Southey’s work, finding that where Virgil ‘derives his matter (a portion of it at least) from nature, but colours it with tints procured from others’, Jonson ‘draws his matter from books, but the colouring is proper to himself’; Virgil, not an ‘original’ but a ‘natural’ poet, is contrasted with Jonson, not natural but original, ‘because a peculiar vein of thought, essentially his own, runs through his compositions’. ‘This last character’, Merivale went on, ‘appears to us applicable to Southey likewise. Although a very artificial writer, he is nevertheless an original one.’ Merivale’s is an acute but unsatisfactory account of Southey, since it seems so often to have the right observation in view, but so frequently to take it up by the wrong end. ‘Books are absolutely necessary to set him a-thinking,’ Merivale writes of Southey quite accurately; but when he follows this statement with the disjunctive, ‘but he rarely borrows the thoughts or the style which he finds in them’, he loses sight of the Southey of the ‘Funeral Song’. Merivale in 1839 thought that Southey’s ‘Funeral Song’ had failed, and had done so more markedly for the opportunities it spurned: ‘This was indeed a subject on which the dullest laureate who ever swallowed sack, could scarcely have failed to be impressive. Yet even here the poet has shown that want of taste and finish which disfigures so many of his happiest efforts.’28 In 1817, however, the ‘Funeral Song’ was a long way below the level of the public’s attention to the Laureate following the pirated publication of his early drama Wat Tyler in February of that year. Wat Tyler’s inconvenient publication drew Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Southey’s defence, and brought with him Jonson. The history of Southey’s Laureate embarrassment has been related many times and can be recapitulated here briefly: how the manuscript of the cheerfully republican drama written by Southey in 1794 passed through the hands of various intermediaries before falling into those of the enterprising publishers Sherwood, Neely, and Jones; how the play they published in February 1817 so signally contradicted the pronouncements of the now much older and, politically, greatly altered Southey in the Quarterly Review; and how Southey’s attempts to suppress the publication through the Chancery Court, where they were dismissed by Lord Eldon, were subsequently raised in Parliament by the MP William Smith who (as 28 Herman Merivale, unsigned review: Edinburgh Review, 68 (Jan. 1839), 354–76; repr. in Lionel Madden, ed., Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 398–408.

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The Courier reported on 15 March) at great length ‘complained . . . that a man, after he had changed his opinions, should use the most violent and scurrilous language against those who now entertain the same opinions’.29 Southey’s embarrassment drew from Coleridge a series of articles in The Courier that maintained a stance of a guileless inappropriateness on which Dorothy Wordsworth, for one, was quick to comment.30 Writing to Catherine Clarkson, she allowed that although Wat Tyler was ‘an infamous thing’, Southey’s position in that respect at least was safe: ‘If I were in Southey’s place’, she went on, ‘I sho[uld] be far more afraid of my injudicious defen[ders] than my open enemies. Coleridge, for instance, has taken up the Cudgels; and of injudicious defenders he is surely the Master Leader.’31 Coleridge’s waywardness, as Dorothy Wordsworth saw, is remarkable. Attesting to the lack of ‘self-interest’ in Southey’s politics, and literary career more generally, he denied the caricature of Southey as an inconstant friend, ready to change sides as occasion demands, that Smith had delivered in the House. On the contrary, Coleridge declares: Mr. Southey’s zeal is unquestionable proof of his sincerity and deep feeling. He has seen both sides of the question in all their different shades and colours, and he can speak from experience, from the evidence of facts. Mr. Southey’s opinions were changed long before he received any favours from the Government.

Coleridge’s no doubt well-intentioned words admit of too many shadings of tone to be effective: this mode of support by concession not only tacitly accepts Southey’s shift in opinion (for it could not readily deny it) but hauls in favours which it might well have done better to leave unspoken. When Coleridge contrasts the ‘hundreds’ of pounds—in addition to his ‘Laureat’s pension’—earned by Southey with the ‘thousands’ he might make ‘with his great talents as a Journalist in London’, the indiscretion is only compounded.32 29 Jack Simmons, Southey (London: Collins, 1945), 158–62; S. T. Coleridge, Essays on His Times in ‘The Morning Post’ and ‘The Courier’, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), ii. 449–60 nn.; and Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 253–63. 30 Coleridge contributed two pairs of articles, the first printed on 17 and 18 Mar. 1817, the second, slightly further apart, on 27 Mar. and 2 Apr.; the apparent sequence is broken only by Coleridge’s ‘review’ of his own Second Lay Sermon on 25 Mar., which shares many of its concerns with the four pieces more directly addressed to Southey. 31 Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 13 Apr. 1817 (The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Mary Moorman, rev. Alan G. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), ii. 379–80). 32 S. T. Coleridge, Essays, ii. 451–2.

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But running through Coleridge’s frequently gauche gestures of solidarity is a larger theme: that of the writer and the state. It is a relationship that focuses much of his thinking in this period—in journalism, lectures, and marginalia—and it appears likely that Southey went some way to crystallize this issue for him. With the position of the Laureate clearly on his mind, Coleridge wrote on 17 March that in present society, ‘an age of tyranny and oppression according to the mob orators of the day’, ‘Those who hate the Government in Church and State, naturally enough wish to make all public offices disgraceful; and, in particular, they attempt to render those ridiculous which are merely of an elegant nature, and ornamental to the Crown’. In public opinion, Coleridge argues, ‘the trappings of royalty’ are used to divest both the Laureateship and its holder of authority; regardless, he continues, it is to Southey’s opinions in the Quarterly Review that one must look for ‘the best exposition of the present state of the country which has yet appeared’.33 The fourth article confirms Southey in this trajectory: Coleridge attests that so far from being a seditious radical, the Poet Laureate now offers multiple ‘proofs of the strongest and most glowing attachment to the Laws, Constitution, and established Religion of Great Britain’.34 Coleridge’s relationship with Southey has provoked many varied assessments, not least because of the variety of forms such relationships took.35 Brothers-in-law since 1795, their relations in and through poetry have been construed divergently as those of either collaboration or emulous competition;36 later, once Coleridge had left the Lakes for London, Southey stood as a father figure to the children left behind in Keswick (‘Vice-fathership’ was Coleridge’s delightful rendering of the position).37 But, in late marginalia to his copy of Southey’s Lives of the British Admirals (1833–7), Coleridge could refer mockingly to ‘our Laurel-laurelling Laureate’.38 The literary, political, and familial, that 33

34 S. T. Coleridge, Essays, ii. 449, 452–4. Ibid. ii. 477. Compare Earl Leslie Griggs, ‘Robert Southey’s Estimate of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Study in Human Relations’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 9 (1945), 61–94; and William Empson, ‘Introduction’ to S. T. Coleridge, Selected Poems, ed. William Empson and David Pirie (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 92–5. 36 Contrast Alison Hickey, ‘Coleridge, Southey, ‘‘and Co.’’: Collaboration and Authority’, Studies in Romanticism, 37 (1998), 305–49, with Mary Jacobus, ‘Southey’s Debt to Lyrical Ballads (1798)’, Review of English Studies, ns 22 (1971), 20–36. 37 Coleridge to Sara Coleridge, 15 Feb. 1804 (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), ii. 1062). 38 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), v. 194. 35

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is, are never far apart in Coleridge’s understanding of Southey (or in Southey’s understandings of Coleridge).39 And, for all that Coleridge could write to T. G. Street of Wat Tyler, ‘who in the Devil’s Name ever thought of reading Poetry for any political or practical purposes till these Devil’s Times that we live in?’, the example of Jonson’s tragedy Catiline demonstrates, as I shall argue, that precisely such a mode of reading held remarkable attractions for him.40

II A notebook entry of late 1805 shows Coleridge thinking about praise and dispraise, and, more concessively, about a writer’s place in society: There are Actions which not done mark the greater man; but wch done do not imply a bad or mean man/Such as Martial’s Compliments of Domitian/Dryden as opposed to Milton. By the bye we are too apt to forget, that Contemporaries have not the same wholeness & fixedness in their notions of persons characters that we their posterity have.41

Jonson’s Epigram 36 offers a relevant gloss upon Coleridge’s example, for in ‘To the Ghost of Martial’ he had pondered exactly that relationship between poet and patron upon which the Laureateship focuses attention. Martial, thou gav’st far nobler epigrams To thy domitian, than I can my james; But in my royal subject I pass thee, Thou flattere’dst thine, mine cannot flatter’d be.42

It is tempting to contrast the tact and exactitude of Jonson’s own positioned self in Epigram 36 with Coleridge’s fears for his own ‘instincts’ as described in an immediately preceding notebook entry: he found them ‘so far dog-like/I love beings superior to me better than my Equals’.43 But the contrast between the two genres matters also: the epigram conducts a much more public negotiation than the notebook. The hold 39 Lynda Pratt, ‘The ‘‘Sad Habits’’ of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Unpublished Letters from Joseph Cottle to Robert Southey, 1813–1817’, Review of English Studies, 55 (2004), 75–90. 40 Coleridge to Street, 22 Mar. 1817 (Collected Letters, iv. 713). 41 20 Nov.–14 Dec. 1805: The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 1957–90), entry 2727. 42 1816, viii. 170–1; H&S viii. 38. 43 S. T. Coleridge, Notebooks, entry 2726.

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of the epigram on the public world marks Jonson’s determination; the notebook, in its sympathy, perhaps marks Coleridge’s withdrawal. Coleridge was himself aware of precisely the ways in which such formal decisions impacted upon politics: lecturing on 1 March 1819, he instanced Dryden and Jonson, in whose writings ‘you will find a series of distinct couplets, all upon the same subject, but each having a wholeness of itself,’ as characteristic of a certain mode of political independence.44 To turn from these concerns to the lectures that Coleridge delivered to the London Philosophical Society between January and March 1818 is to encounter further proof of his continued attention to the problems of the state-sponsored poet. Rapidly culling a little historical background for the discussion on ‘the history and philosophy of magic, Witchcraft, Dreams, Omens, Presentiments, Starcraft, etc. with a Theory of Superstition in general’, advertised by The Times (6 March), Coleridge jotted down the following observation from Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718): ‘1603—King Solomon Stuart—& the Parliament in compliment repealed Elizabeth in order to enact a more merciless one—.’ As he adopts James’s own mock-reverential soubriquet in his notes, Coleridge finds the repeal of earlier legislation not a marker of superstition but, with a brisk expectedness, of politics, and the expression such attitudes found in the drama of the time: ‘The consequences as might be expected—Honor to Shakespear —Middleton/Ben Jonson, flattered—/’.45 We should be sensitive by now to the special resonance of Coleridge’s final, dismissive verb, not only in his own earlier discussions of Southey, but in Hazlitt’s contemporaneous discussion of Gifford and Jonson. For the shifting alignments between poet and state which are elsewhere finessed here show Coleridge’s responses operating not only to nineteenth- but to seventeenth-century concerns, marking out a problematic area of independence in the face of financial and political indebtedness which is itself much older. We see once more that a large part of what Coleridge knew, and equally as important, a large part of what structured his thought, was the example of Jonson. The death of Queen Charlotte on 17 November 1818 brings Jonson more clearly into focus as an enabler of Coleridge’s thoughts on monarchy and the poet—with Southey, again, as his counter-example. Her death drew 44 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1818–1819 On the History of Philosophy, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2000), 421–2. 45 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), ii. 196, 206.

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from Southey an ‘Ode on the Death of Queen Charlotte’ in which the presiding influence is not Jonson but Milton, Southey’s ‘Ode’ in many respects a response to, and adaptation of, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ in what are radically altered circumstances.46 The third stanza of Southey’s ‘Ode’ contrasts the nation’s present grief with such as it has known in the past: Then with a passionate sorrow we bewail’d Youth on the untimely bier; And hopes which seem’d like flower-buds full, Just opening to the sun, For ever swept away.

The cadence and allusion are owed to the opening verse paragraph of ‘Lycidas’ and its declaration that Edward King ‘must not float upon his watery bier | Unwept and welter to the parching wind’. Later, the modulation of Southey’s ‘Ode’ recalls the certainties of the earlier poem’s imagining of the future, as its contention ‘No cause for sorrow then, but thankfulness’ picks up the import and lexicon (even as it lacks entirely the boldness) of Milton’s great turn, ‘Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more | For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead’.47 The influence of Milton is pervasive: that this should be so says something both of Southey’s insensitivity to the contexts of the earlier poem and of the invincible self-belief which must have been at work during the composition of the ‘Ode’; for at its close, the ‘Ode’ finally looks beyond ‘Lycidas’ to Milton’s sixteenth sonnet, ‘When I consider how my light is spent’, to locate its instructions to posterity: ‘Who imitates her best | May best deserve our love.’ The scale of the blasphemy ought to astonish: ‘God doth not need | Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best | Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.’ Milton stands in relation to Southey’s ‘Ode’ as Jonson stands in relation to the article which Coleridge drafted for The Courier in the days following Queen Charlotte’s state funeral on 2 December 1818: as the enabler of thought. Charitably, Southey’s ‘Ode’ might be said to be structured by the tension between its closeness to the verbal texture of ‘Lycidas’ and its distance from the situation that gave rise to 46 For Coleridge’s responses to ‘Lycidas’ and, through the poem, to Wordsworth, see Reeve Parker, Coleridge’s Meditative Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 227–35. 47 For Milton’s source in Jonson’s fine assurance in the ‘Cary/Morison Ode’—‘And think, nay know, thy Morison’s not dead. | He leaped the present age’—see Ian Donaldson, ‘Jonson’s Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 6 (1973), 139–52.

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the earlier poem. For all its allusive proximity, the ‘Ode’ (we might say) understands the dissimilarity between the personal circumstances of the relationships which the two poems memorialize: where ‘Lycidas’ is an elegy for Milton’s friend, Edward King, Southey’s ‘Ode’ commemorates the wife of the Poet Laureate’s one-time employer. The public function of the verse differs accordingly: whereas Milton’s poem came into print in a collective volume from King’s friends, Justa Edouardo King Naufrago (1638), Southey’s ‘Ode’ seeks a larger, but less intimate, audience: it addresses a nation, and a nation for whom the dead Queen must have remained, even in life, distanced and separate. Coleridge’s treatment of the same theme and event offers immediate and important contrasts. He had written to William Mudford, editor of The Courier, around 4 December 1818 to offer ‘a character of the late Queen, in connection with the prevailing tendency among a numerous party to asperse their superiors’; though two partial drafts of the essay still survive, it was never completed, the likely culprit for its non-appearance, as Coleridge wrote to Mudford less than a week later, a combination of the young Henry Gillman, ‘who had been seen burning some paper’, and Mudford’s reluctance to return to Coleridge that portion of the article which he already possessed.48 Coleridge’s incomplete ‘Character’ turns not to Milton, as had Southey, but to Jonson’s Catiline, a play which we can be sure Coleridge had read recently, and to which his domestic situation with the Morgans, at Calne, and latterly in Highgate, with the Gillmans, made him peculiarly sensitive. Reason for thinking that his own conditions of residence shaped his attention to the play’s texture is provided by a note keyed to Sempronia’s description of Cicero: ‘He is but a new fellow, | An inmate here in Rome’. Whalley’s note to the speech, reprinted by Stockdale, supplied Sallust’s Latin, which Jonson was here translating: Marcus Tullius inquilinus civis urbis Romæ.49 Attentive to both text and commentary, Coleridge had good reason to think on such a moment and remarked: ‘A Lodger would have been a happier imitation of inquilinus.’50

48 S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv. 890–1, 896. In what follows I quote from the second draft of the ‘Character’ but supply a section lacking in that text from the first draft, omitting Coleridge’s deletions and silently supplying all his insertions: for diplomatic transcriptions of both drafts see his Essays, iii. 251–6. 49 50 1811, i. 388. S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, iii. 185.

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He thought more extensively of Catiline, however, than this local, lodged moment might suggest. On the blank verso facing the opening scene of Catiline he drafted the following thought: A fondness for judging one work by comparison with others, perhaps altogether of a different Class, argues a vulgar Taste. Yet it is chiefly on this Principle that the Cataline has been rated so low.—Take it and Sejanus, as compositions of a particular Kind—viz. as a mode of relating great historical Events in the liveliest and most interesting manner, and I cannot help wishing that we had whole Volumes of such Plays. We might as rationally expect the excitement of the Vicar of Wakefield from Goldsmith’s History of England, as that of Lear, Othello &c from the Sejanus & Cataline.51

In the ‘Character of Queen Charlotte’ we see a development of this idea: not simply Catiline as a relation of ‘great historical Events,’ but the play held vitally in relation to the events of Coleridge’s time, and particularly the issues and language that predominated in his defences of Southey. The ‘Character’ is much exercised by what Coleridge argues is the root characteristic of the age: ‘a restless overweening Conceit of Rights independent of Duties’. The two words, he continues, are so frequently employed that rather than mutually reinforcing one another they seem ‘symptoms of two contrary states of mind: the less regard an Individual pays to his Duties, the more parade he is sure to make about his personal and political Rights’. An even greater scepticism pervades the central section of the essay (which I quote at length): This same predilection for Rights, however, so far from blinding us to the non-performance of Duties in others, of all at least who are above us, renders us remarkably quick-sighted to them, and not seldom even creative: the inrush of the inventive faculty filling up any aching Void in the perceptive, at the same time that the Memory becomes so surprisingly retentive that an Error or Misconduct shall appear as fresh and lively after an interval of Twenty or Thirty years, as a Flower fresh plucked, and with the Dew still on its petals. As much improved moreover in all its dimensions, as if it had been growing during the whole interval! But this becomes an especial right, whenever a King, Queen, or Prince is the subject: and for this especial reason, that in spite of all our instructions and examples, there are so many who neglect to exercise this

51 Ibid. iii. 184. In the following decade this low estimation changed, at least two dramatic versions of the narrative appearing in print: George Croly, Catiline: A Tragedy in Five Acts (London: Hurst and Robinson, 1822); and Henry M. Milner, Lucius Catiline, the Roman Traitor: A Drama in Three Acts (London: J. Lowndes, [1827]).

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right, because the Bible, forsooth, forbids them to speak evil of them that bear rule over us. We cannot, however, complain of any undue extension of the text to a similar immunity of Minister and other Hirelings of the State. Whatever they do, is ipso facto either absurd or tyrannical. One of our elder writers, whose Learning and Genius will not bribe the Friends of Freedom to forget, that he was Poet Laureate, and of course therefore a base Apostate, hired by Government to slander the advocates of Reform under the character of cataline, who pretended Conspiracy manufactured out of Cicero’s Green Bag was made the pretext for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act at Rome—this old Placeman and Pensioner, ben jonson by name, has (I say) acknowledged, as a Right of Custom, however much he would dissuade us from exercising the same, in the following verses: In our blind censures of the State We still do wander: And make the careful Magistrate The Butt of Slander. What age is this, where honest men, Placed at the Helm A Sea from some foul mouth or pen Shall overwhelm? And call their diligence deceit, Their virtues vice; Their watchfulness but lying in wait, And blood the price. O let us pluck this evil seed Out of our spirits; And give to every noble Deed The name, it merits: Lest we seem fall’n (if this endures) Into those times, To love Disease and brook the Cures Worse than the Crimes.52

The most recent editor of these fragmentary drafts, David Erdman, comments reservedly that Jonson’s ‘laureateship is expected to call to mind Robert Southey’s’.53 This, as by now will be appreciated, underplays the importance of the observation; rather, I think, we see the ‘density 52 S. T. Coleridge, Essays, iii. 254–5. Coleridge’s quotation varies Jonson’s original; but though it seems to follow 1816 over Q1611, F1616, 1756, and 1811 in employing quatrains, its text is not Gifford’s. 53 Ibid. iii. 253 n.

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and complexity’ that, in William Jewett’s phrase, attend on Coleridge’s writing when he considers how ‘public questions of political action intrude into the more private realms of moral and aesthetic decision’.54 Coleridge’s writing is here locked into historical circumstance by the extended if involuted parallel it draws between the conspiracy of Catiline and the House of Common’s enquiry into the Spencean Conspiracy of 1816. Yet, for all that, Coleridge’s historical analogies are loose, the habit of mind which sees contemporary politics refracted through the actions of the Stuart state, and the Stuart state enacting its own power struggles in relation to classical Rome, is crucial. This doubly recessive mode of historical thinking attributes enormous power to the artistic measures by which the state seeks to support itself. Coleridge is not merely being provocative when he compares the ‘Minister’ to ‘other Hirelings of the State’; rather, the sarcasm of his argument tacitly grants that the arts are of central importance to the exercise and maintenance of power. Jonson’s great humanistic virtues, his ‘Learning and Genius’, are contrasted with the inflationary self-presentation of those more recent ‘Friends of Freedom’ who claim that the Laureate must ‘slander’ all opponents of the Government and the status quo which supports it. Coleridge’s tone sneers at those who would dismiss the accumulated power of the state, its religious and secular institutions (of which the Laureate was but one), in favour of a new radicalism; his prose pulls him into line behind the same institutions to which his lecture later in the month would recruit Shakespeare, when describing his ‘profound veneration for all the established institutions of society’ and his delight ‘in hereditary institutions’.55 Coleridge’s diction in the angry ventriloquistic indictment he drafted for The Courier anticipates his lengthy quotation from the fourth chorus of Catiline: they share a vocabulary of ‘State’ and ‘slander’ and, moreover, a contrast between the honourable individual—the Ciceronian magistrate of Catiline, the Minister or poet of Coleridge’s draft—and those who oppose him on self-regardingly ideological grounds. Indeed, as Coleridge claims to leave aside ‘the assumed language’ of Jonson’s drama, he enforces its ‘application’ to his own time. The passage’s contemporary application is found most readily in writings critical of Coleridge 54 William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 24. 55 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ii. 272–3; compare ‘the hollow extravagance of Beaum. and Fletch’s Ultra-royalism’ (ii. 285); and idem, Marginalia, i. 380, 389.

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and the state, rather than supportive of it. Compare the following remarkable passage from William Hazlitt’s (anonymous) review of the Biographia Literaria: The Cannings, the Giffords, and the Freres, have never made any apology for the abuse which they then heaped upon every nominal friend of freedom; and yet Mr. Coleridge thinks it necessary to apologize in the name of all good men, for having remained so long averse to a party which recruited upon such a bounty; and seems not obscurely to intimate that they had such effectual means of propagating their slanders against those good men who differed with them, that most the latter found there was no other way of keeping their good name but by giving up their principles, and joining in the same venal cry against all those who did not become apostates or converts, ministerial Editors, and ‘laurel-honouring Laureates’ like themselves!56

Coleridge’s draft of December 1818 takes up so closely the terms launched by Hazlitt in the Edinburgh that it might almost be thought a reply: in both passages the friends of freedom rub shoulders and mingle with apostates and Laureates, Ministers and slanderers. Coleridge’s employment of Jonson is complex. He stands, at one level, as an impartial double to Southey, as a figure of the Laureate uncompromised by his position, but who still had cause to defend the state and its operations. But the dramatic context from which Coleridge derives his quotation complicates this alignment. The fourth act of Catiline, closed by the Chorus which Coleridge quotes, is remarkable for the fluidity of its political alignments; the act opens with the Allobrogian ambassadors confronting the frightened reality of the senate, whose powers their presence underwrites, a reality which prompts one of their number to thoughts of changed political allegiance: Are we employ’d here by our miseries, Like superstitious fools (or rather slaves) To plain our griefs, wrongs, and oppressions, To a mere clothed senate, whom our folly Hath made, and still intends to keep, our tyrants?57

But such thoughts are quickly dispelled by the example of the ‘magistrate’ Cicero in the scene immediately following, Cicero whose ‘authority’ 56 Edinburgh Review, 28 (Aug. 1817), 488–515; cited from J. R. de J. Jackson, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970–91), i. 299. 57 1811, i. 405; H&S iv. 12–16; future references will be given by page number to 1811, the text Coleridge read, and by act and line number to H&S.

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temporarily quells thoughts of a new dispensation. As the act progresses, Catiline’s conspirators reveal that they have approached the Allobrogians—suffering under financial impositions, and reported to be ‘watching after change, | And now, in present hatred with our state’ (i. 412; iv. 583–4)—for support. This information is rapidly relayed to Cicero by the spy Sanga; and the Allobrogians are brought in for persuasion. They acknowledge themselves ‘tempted lately | To a defection’, but, when the following scene closes, have again pledged their support to the state, and are dispatched as double agents to a meeting of the conspirators at Sempronia’s house (i. 413; iv. 664–5). The act ends—Coleridge having taken to the margin of his copy to bewail the ‘determined remorseless alldaring Foolhardiness’ of ‘such a mouthing Tamburlane and bombastic Tongue-Bully as this Cethegus’58 —as the Allobrogians, rather than fight for Catiline, yield to the state. The Chorus is prompted to reflect on their apparent fickleness by this side-shifting on the part of the Allobrogians. Jonson shows them coming into awareness of the history of their changing affections: Of what strange pieces are we made, Who nothing know; But as new airs our ears invade, Still censure so? That now do hope, and now do fear And now envy; And then do hate, and then love dear, But know not why: Or if we do, it is so late, As our best mood, Though true, is then thought out of date, And empty of good. How have we chang’d, and come about In every doom, Since wicked Catiline went out, And quitted Rome? (i. 415; iv. 851–66)

The Chorus’s tone of vacant puzzlement at their own actions in these lines hardens into a more considered acknowledgement of their past vacillations: the lines show their speakers coming into political maturity, 58 S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, iii. 186; the annotation is at the foot of 1811, i. 414, the verso facing the Chorus Coleridge quoted in the unfinished Courier article.

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into an awareness not only of the complexities of the state, but of the attractions to change which they must none the less resist. In what relationship do Southey’s (and Coleridge’s own) political shifts stand to Jonson’s play? To Southey the relationship was typically blunt. In a note to The Two Foscari, published in December 1821, Byron had attacked ‘Mr. Southey, with all his places and presents for panegyrics’; the note represented only the latest stage in hostilities between the two, recently enlivened by Southey in the preface to A Vision of Judgment, published in August of the same year. In the note, Southey’s ‘shifting and turncoat existence’ is held up by Byron against the measure of his own life, on which, by comparison, he wrote, he was able ‘to look back with an honest pride, not to be damped by the calumnies of a hireling’.59 Byron’s lexis is charged, his account of place, shifting, and the hireling poet taking up the key terms of Coleridge’s 1818 intervention; but to Southey it seemed simply discharged. He wrote an open letter to The Courier from Keswick on 5 January 1822, printed on the 11th: The many opprobrious appellations which Lord Byron has bestowed upon me, I leave, as I find them, with the praises which he has bestowed upon himself. How easily is a noble spirit discern’d From harsh and sulphurous matter, that flies out In contumelies, makes a noise, and stinks!60

The three-line quotation attributed to ‘b.jonson’ is from Catiline: the lines are spoken by the Allobrogians in Act iv as they acknowledge the force of Cicero’s words of persuasion. Although, taken out of context, the lines seek to reduce Byron to the status of a flatulent, contumelious opponent, their context within the dramatic texture of Jonson’s play hoists Southey on his own quotation: the very facility with which the Allobrogians are ‘struck’ with the ‘awe’ of Cicero, their pious hope for ‘good and great men’, those ‘that know how | To stoop to wants and meet necessities’, pinion Southey (iv. 45–54). He seems, of course, to have been unaware of all of

59 Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), vi. 223–4, 628. 60 The Courier, 11 Jan. 1822, pp. 2–3, substituting ‘easily’ for ‘easy’ in Catiline, iv. 50–2 (1816, iv. 290); I am grateful to Peter Cochrane for this reference.

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this: ‘I am accustomed to such things,’ his letter magnanimously and emptily continues.61 For Coleridge the matter was more complex and more rewarding. Catiline offered Coleridge a model for thought, through and against which he was able to fashion a response to Southey and to his own changing political disposition. Though he was apparently content to allow the fragmentary drafts of the ‘Character’ to remain unprinted, they offer not only an important index of Coleridge’s changing political sympathies, but also a means of relating his literary reading to the more worldly concerns that occupied him. To this extent at least, Coleridge’s personal relationship with Southey was of less concern to his thought and writing than what Southey, by nature of his position as Laureate, represented of the writer’s relation to the polity and to power. Jonson offered him the means of articulating these concerns: a figure of the Laureate who was not compromised and who successfully negotiated a space in which writing under patronage could be freed from charges of dependence and sycophancy. Jonson, by contrast with Southey, was the idealized Laureate: his independence in the face of dependency held powerful attraction for Coleridge. By thinking of Southey through Jonson’s example, Coleridge not only gained purchase on his present, but was able to imagine a future. But to turn now to the figure of Hartley Coleridge is to see Jonson not so much as an enabler of political thought as to be returned to the complex associations of paternity and inheritance, both literary and familial, from which my discussion in the previous chapter departed. Can a familial account of Romantic allusion be recovered?

III Jonson, none of whose children survived him, wrote in Discoveries: ‘Greatnesse of name, in the Father, oft-times helpes not forth, but o’rewhelmes the Sonne: they stand too neere one another. The shadow kils the growth; so much, that wee see the Grand-child come more, and oftner, to be the heire of the first, than doth the second: He dies

61 On the same day The Courier advertised Canto 1 of the anonymous Royal Progress (London: J. Green, 1816), dedicated to Lord Byron, with a quotation from Jonson’s The Irish Masque.

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betweene; the Possession is the thirds.’62 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s eldest son, Hartley, died childless in 1849. When, in 1851, Derwent Coleridge came to collect the two posthumous volumes of his brother’s poetry, his prefatory ‘Memoir’ dwelt valuably upon what he called the apparently unique example offered by Samuel Taylor and Hartley Coleridge. Hartley’s name, Derwent wrote, ‘must ever be associated with that of his father, a portion of whose genius he certainly possessed, and appears to have inherited’.63 But there is a diffidence in the terms on which Derwent then proceeds to offer his brother’s poetry to the reading public, a diffidence compounded of the blunt and colloquial (‘At any rate’) and the indirect and circumlocutory (‘it may not be wholly unimportant’) in the following coolly understated formulation: At any rate we have here an instance where the poetic faculty, contrary to what has been laid down as a rule, seems to have been transmitted by natural descent; and it may not be wholly unimportant to learn in what relation a son, so gifted, stood to such a father.64

Jonson, patriarch of the Sons of Ben, offers us the means of formulating the relation here described by Derwent, and he does so most forcefully at such moments in Hartley’s writing as are themselves intimately concerned with the relation of father to son. Christopher Ricks was touched to thought by the following, from J. B. Broadbent: ‘Literary allusion can be a lesson in the abuse of authority, as well as in the generous spending of an inheritance. We need an essay on ‘‘The poet as heir’’.’65 I have so far been concerned to offer an account of Coleridge and Jonson that views allusion not through familial concerns, but rather through the transactions of the literary economies of credit and praise; to put it another way, I have traced the spending rather 62 Disc., 413–18 (H&S viii. 576), well discussed by Jennifer Brady, ‘Progenitors and Other Sons in Ben Jonson’s Discoveries’, in James Hirsh, ed., New Perspectives on Ben Jonson (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 16–34. 63 Poems by Hartley Coleridge with a Memoir of his Life by his Brother, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1851), i. p. xvi. 64 Ibid. i. p. xvii. Hartley’s sister Sara wrote of the relation: ‘Seldom has a Poet had so poetical a son as S T Coleridge had in Hartley. Not one poet of this age beside has transmitted a spark of his fire to his offspring’ (Sara Coleridge and Henry Reed, ed. Leslie Nathan Broughton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1937), 64). 65 C. Ricks, ‘Dryden and Pope’, in his Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–42, revised from first publication as ‘Allusion: The Poet as Heir’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds., Studies in the Eighteenth Century III (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), 209–40.

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than the provenance of the inheritance. The lexicon in which allusion has traditionally been described, a keeping which includes borrowing, interest, and debt (together with its many cognates), is both historically available and newly charged in the early nineteenth century. Hartley Coleridge offers the possibility of resolving the two discourses which previously I have been at pains, a little artificially, to hold apart. As a poet who, in interrogation of the ‘Rule’ stated by Thomas Fuller—‘Poeta non fit, sed nascitur, one is not made but born a Poet’—was obliged to know himself both born to and made by another poet, Hartley Coleridge’s poetry naturally has recourse to allusion as a mode of its being; moreover, the questions of geniture and inheritance were ones with which he was properly and intelligently concerned, in poetry and prose, throughout his life and writing career.66 Jonson himself had earlier seen the ways in which birth and making could interact in a poet’s life, not only in Epigram 22, ‘On My First Daughter’, and Epigram 45, ‘On My First Son’, with its lapidary tribute to ‘ben. ionson his best piece of poetrie’, but in the ample tribute he wrote for the Shakespeare First Folio in 1623, with its wry recognition: ‘For a good Poet’s made, as well as borne’ (UV 26).67 But Hartley’s inheritance from his father was not merely literary, and in the provision made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for his 33-year-old eldest son’s future in a codicil to his will dated 2 July 1830, it is not the familial and the poetic that come together, but the familial and the financial. Derwent Coleridge’s ‘Memoir’ does not wince at the ‘peculiar’ circumstances attending on the codicil, but rather quotes the document in full with admirable, unembarrassed openness: Most desirous to secure as far as in me lies for my dear son Hartley the tranquillity indispensable to any continued and successful exertion of his literary talents, and which, from the like characters of our minds in this respect, I know to be especially requisite for his happiness, and persuaded that he will recognise in this 66 Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London: Thomas Williams, 1662), iii. 126, contextualized in Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), P451; Hartley’s own Biographia Borealis; or, Lives of Distinguished Northerns (London: Whitaker et al., 1833), professes, in a gesture to Fuller, to introduce its reader ‘to an acquaintance with the several Worthies that may drop in upon him during the course of publication’ (p. viii); it was itself republished in 1836 as Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire and, in 1852, as Lives of Northern Worthies. 67 On Jonson’s fondness for a related formulation from Florus, Solus rex et poeta non quotannis nascitur, see Martin Butler, ‘ ‘‘Servant, but not Slave’’: Ben Jonson at the Jacobean Court’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 90 (1996), 65–93.

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provision that anxious affection by which it is dictated, I affix this codicil to my last will and testament; and I hereby give and bequeath to Joseph Henry Green, Esquire, to Henry Nelson Coleridge, Esquire, and to James Gillman, Esquire, and the survivor of them, and the executors and assignees of such survivor, the sum whatever it may be which in the will aforesaid I bequeathed to my son Hartley Coleridge after the decease of his mother, Sara Coleridge, upon trust. And I hereby request them (the said trustees) to hold the sum accruing to Hartley Coleridge from the equal division of my total bequest between him, his brother Derwent, and his sister Sara Coleridge, after his mother’s decease, to dispose of the interest or proceeds of the same portion to or for the use of my dear son Hartley Coleridge at such time or times, in such manner, and under such condition as they the trustees above named know to be my wish, and shall deem conducive to the attainment of my object in adding this codicil, namely, the anxious wish to ensure for my son the continued means of a home, in which I comprise board, lodging, and raiment. Providing that nothing in this codicil shall be so interpreted as to interfere with my son Hartley Coleridge’s freedom of choice respecting the place of residence, or with his power of disposing of his portion by will after his decease according as his own judgment and affections may decide.68

Such an inheritance as was here willed to Hartley is a deferral. The legal trust created by the codicil places in the hands of Joseph Henry Green, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and James Gillman that which cannot safely be placed in Hartley’s; by a caring, unmalicious twist it is an admission precisely of Coleridge’s lack of trust in his son: even in such balanced, legalistic prose, the word is wrenched.69 When Coleridge died in July 1834, Hartley wrote movingly of his regrets in a letter to Derwent which the latter quoted in the ‘Memoir’ of 1851. Hartley’s regrets mount up in his prose, pulled against his father and his brother, finally for the piled, paratactic clauses to collapse into a blankly despairing ‘but’ and a hopeless cluster of modal verbs, being brought to bear on an absence which cannot be repaired and a debt which cannot be paid: That I did not pray with him when he uttered his last prayer, that I partook not with him the blessed Sacrament, that I heard not his last words, I shall ever regret; for I had not, as you have, imperative duties to withhold me, and had I known—; but what use is it now to say what I might, or would, or ought to have

68 Poems (1851), i. pp. cxii–cxiii; the text differs only in punctuation from the probated copy of the will, BL Add. Ch 66314. 69 Hartley never inherited the capital: on the death of his mother, an annuity was purchased on his life (Poems (1851), i. p. cxi).

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done? He is gone—gone from earth for ever, and to whom can I pay the huge debt of duty which I owe him?70

A skein of half-rhyme threads through Hartley’s prose, a repeated sounding of what has been known and done, what has gone (this twice), and finally what it is still to owe. In such patterning, such formations of despair, Hartley’s emotion is structured and directed. But he thought more widely of ‘the huge debt of duty’ owed to his father. Ricks wrote of Dryden that he was ‘not simply . . . preoccupied with fathers and poetic lineage, but that the parallel with the nature of allusion—the poet as heir—lent particular life to this preoccupation, his most creative allusions being those of which the quick is paternity and inheritance’.71 Dryden matters because he provoked Hartley’s preoccupation with paternity and inheritance also. In an annotation to the set of Anderson’s British Poets that had been his father’s, Hartley took issue with an earlier discussion: The ‘‘Quarterly Review’’ carelessly instances the sons of Dryden, as almost the only poetical sons of poets. Has he forgotten Bernardo and Torquato Tasso? It is, however, pretty remarkable that no English poet has made a family. It is said, indeed, that there are descendants of Spenser in existence. Genius is certainly not hereditary, though a certain degree of talent sometimes descends,—oftener in the female than the male. Scribbling is very infectious, and authors have a habit of warning their sons against the trade, which is most wise.72

There is nothing careless in Hartley’s annotation: to write thus in a book which had once belonged to his father cannot but have caused Hartley to consider his own example. But he thinks of himself in terms which deliberately belittle his achievement; though such diminutions are worn lightly, they are at the quick of his thoughts. In the essay ‘Books and Bantlings’, Hartley expanded upon the figure of writing and paternity to observe that ‘the partiality of authors for their works greatly resembles that of parents for their children’.73 The tone of much of Hartley’s writing is hard to gauge: his prose, perhaps under the influence of Lamb, can sound bantering and ironic, but is only, as Derwent saw, ‘occasionally playful’. The essays, Derwent wrote, were only ‘apparently, of so light a character’; ‘apparently’, he added, proceeding at once to apt and precise qualification, ‘for there is little or 70

71 Ibid. i. p. cxii. Ricks, ‘Dryden and Pope’, 9–42. H. Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia, ed. Derwent Coleridge, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1851), ii. 33–4. 73 Ibid. ii. 84. 72

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no real levity’.74 Here, then, the skill and dexterity with which Hartley fills out the commonplace of author as parent begin to tell of a seriousness of focus which is belied by the humour of his style. ‘The genuine literary parent’, he writes, desires indeed that his offspring should be dear to others as to himself . . . He is also distinguished by a longing for posthumous fame rather than temporary e´ clat. So do affectionate fathers pray that their posterity may survive them, and hope to live after death in their children’s children.

He continues: Every father and mother that have many children, however impartial they may deem it their duty to show themselves, will be better pleased with some than others. There is a pet in almost every family. So it is with the authors of many works. However well they may love them all, they will have some pet production, some favourite passage, some minion thought, some darling simile. One will prefer his first-born, another the child of his old age. Some the offspring of the hardest labour, and some the babe easiest of birth. Nor shall we be at a loss to find among these literary parental partialities a strong similitude to the affection which mothers are said to feel for weaklings and idiots.75

Such words could not readily have been written by Hartley without some sense of his own birth intruding on his speculations; it is not to fall prey to a gossipy, biographical fallacy to assert that, for Hartley, such reflections could not but have required of him a measure of self-reflection, or to prompt his readers equally to that scrutiny. Here again, when literary paternity is so centrally in his mind, Dryden joins Hartley’s thoughts, and with him Jonson. Writing of Dryden in his notebooks, Hartley takes up the deprecation launched so damagingly by Dryden at Jonson’s late plays—‘dotages’—and turns it back, neutralized by family associations: Hartley describes himself ‘taking the part of the children of Ben’s old age, the more because those dotages were rather favourites of S.T.C.’.76 But so too was Hartley contrastively aware of those, like Dryden, who held the late plays in less favourable regard. His annotation to Carew’s poem on The New Inn, ‘To Ben Johnson upon Occasion of his Ode to Himself’, takes the poem’s criticism forcefully but appreciatively: I have seldom read a more kindly, manly, gentlemanly mixture of praise and admonition than this. I hope Ben took it as it was meant, and yet I can well 74 75

H. Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia, i. p. vii. 76 Ibid. i. 88–9. Ibid. ii. 93.

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excuse the old man’s anger at the dishonour done to the child of his old age, which he might regard at once with a father’s and a grandsire’s love. Nothing can be crueller than to reproach an aged author with the decay of his powers.77

It is tempting to think that Hartley’s metaphor, as also his compassion, was sparked in part by two lines from Carew, lines which find their echo in much of what has been discussed. Carew assures Jonson that by comparison with his present detractors, ‘Thy labour’d workes shall live, when Time devoures | Th’abortive ofspring of theyr hasty howers’.78 These lines resonate with Hartley’s prose. More pointedly, as Jonson’s Epigrams so painfully recall, such hopes for survival as Carew announces were borne out only in the literary sense: the phrase in which Hartley describes The New Inn, ‘the child of his old age,’ must echo and reverse the phrase which Jonson gave to his first daughter jointly from her parents: ‘Mary, the daughter of their youth’ (Epigram 22).79 Not only was Hartley sensible of the force of paternity and inheritance in his own life and writings, but he was intelligent as to the power of the metaphor in others’. Though his writings on Jonson do not comprise a fully considered account, their moments of local vividness demand attention not only for their acuity, but for their closeness to the comments and estimations of his father on the same topic. By turning now to examine those moments when Hartley thinks about Jonson through the example of his father, we see his criticism responding vitally to its object; and in the discussion with which this chapter closes, the dedicatory sonnet to his father which opens Hartley’s Poems (1833), an expression of this concern at its most artful and most poignant. Hartley Coleridge’s edition of The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford (1840) begins with a biographical introduction that in turn begins with an apology: The lives of our great dramatists ‘‘of the great race’’ furnish few materials for drama. They are provokingly barren of incident. The present neither complicated plots, nor striking situations*, nor well-contrasted characters. In their own age, they were overlooked as too familiar—in the next, cast aside as unfashionable.80 77

78 Ibid. ii. 8. H&S xi. 336. The ‘one affecting line’ in the poem according to Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 66. 80 The quotation misremembers Dryden’s ‘Gyant Race, before the Flood’ (‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, on his Comedy, call’d the Double-Dealer’), itself the starting-point for many discussions of allusion and inheritance: see W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1970), and Eric Griffiths, ‘Dryden’s Past’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1993), 113–49. 79

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and proceeds at once (via the note signalled in his third sentence) to a second apology, which is this time a qualification and an exception: * I beg pardon. The life of Ben Jonson does present at least one striking situation, which would make a fine picture either on the stage or on canvas. I allude to that juncture, when amid a company of friends assembled to congratulate his discharge from prison, his mother produced the packet of poison, which she meant to have given him, had he been sentenced to pillory and mutilation for his reflections on the King’s countrymen. But is there any good authority for the story?81

The sources of the passing familiarity with Jonson’s biography which Hartley here demonstrates are suggested by the letter he wrote to Edward Moxon, accepting the invitation to work on the edition. He would write, so he told Moxon, an introduction similar to that provided by ‘Barry Cornwall’ (Bryan Waller Procter) for his 1838 edition of Jonson’s Dramatic Works.82 As far as his own avowedly derivative edition was concerned, Hartley continued, I think I can borrow Gifford’s Massinger. I shall be obliged to you for Ford, likewise Ben Jonson, who is a huge favourite of mine. I don’t think his biographer, Barry, entre nous, has done him half justice. Of his poems, which abound in grand moral truths and powerful thought, sometimes finely, sometimes, it may be, quaintly illustrated, but always expressed in sterling English, a better sample might have been given than a few songs, one of which, passing pretty in its way, is hardly fit for modern lady-singing, even by ladies who warble Tom Moore with perfect innocence; you cannot misunderstand old Ben into propriety.83

This concern with what Jonson elsewhere called ‘language fescennine’ (Und. 75) ought not to divert our attention from Hartley’s more powerful estimation of Jonson’s poems; but neither should it cause us to pass over the source of his characterization of Jonson’s ‘sterling English’, for it is precisely in the matter of Jonson’s language that Hartley’s becomes problematic.84 81 Hartley Coleridge, ed., The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford (London: Edward Moxon, 1840), p. ix. 82 Cornwall printed Gifford’s text without annotation; I discuss this edition further in the Conclusion. 83 Hartley Coleridge to Edward Moxon, 30 Mar. 1839 (Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Grace Evelyn and Earl Leslie Griggs (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 231–3); first published in Poems (1851), i. pp. cxlviii–cl. 84 Hartley elsewhere demonstrates a familiarity with Jonson’s poetry: his Massinger and Ford uses Jonson’s ‘Execration’ to date the burning of the Globe (p. x); in the following year, responding to a request for a second copy of a poem which had been burned, Hartley

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Consider the following passage from the lecture delivered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, probably to the London Philosophical Society, on 17 February 1818: Ben Jonson exhibits a sterling English diction, and he has with great skill contrived varieties of construction; but his style is rarely sweet or harmonious, in consequence of his labour at point and strength being so evident. In all his works, in verse or prose, there is an extraordinary opulence of thought; but it is the produce of an amassing power in the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson’s thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist.85

As Coleridge was concerned here to trace Jonson back into his reading, so might we follow Hartley’s steps back into his father’s writings. A localized example, the coincidence of both father and son commenting on the value of Jonson’s ‘sterling English’ permits of equally tight answers to the questions it raises. Hartley, as we shall see, certainly attended others of his father’s lectures, though his source (if source it is) seems more likely here to have been the edition of Coleridge’s Literary Remains (1836–9).86 Along with selections from Coleridge’s marginalia to Jonson from his 1811 Dramatic Works, the Literary Remains also included Green’s notes of the February 1818 lecture, the first occasion on which these notes were printed. Might Hartley have read them? It seems inconceivable that he did not, and unlikely at best that he was not concerned in some way with the editorial preservation of his father’s lectures; indeed, he is thanked by Henry Nelson Coleridge in the ‘Advertisement’ to the fourth volume of Literary Remains (1839). The father’s tested, numismatic account of Jonson’s language is here inherited by the son, the adjective’s currency reasserted in Hartley’s usage. Another example testifies to the closeness of Hartley’s readings in his father and Jonson. Reading Sejanus in his Stockdale edition, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reacted strongly to the following exchange between Arruntius, Silius, and Sabinus: offered a new poem rather than, ‘as Ben Johnson on similar occasion’, compose ‘Execrations to Vulcan’ (The Hartley Coleridge Letters: A Calendar and Index, ed. Fran Carlock Stephens, (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Humanities Research Center, 1978), 25, 114). 85

From Joseph Henry Green’s notes: Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ii. 153. The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Sara and H. N. Coleridge, 4 vols. (London: Pickering, 1836–9). 86

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Allusion and Imitation Arr. The name Tiberius, I hope, will keep, howe’er he hath foregone The dignity and power. Sil. Sure, while he lives. Arr. And dead, it comes to Drusus. Should he fail, To the brave issue of Germanicus: And they are three: too many (ha?) for him To have a plot upon? Sab. I do not know The heart of his designs; but, sure, their face Looks farther than the preset. Arr. By the gods, If I could guess he had but such a thought, My swords should cleave him down from head to heart, But I would find it out. (i. 194; i. 244–55)

Coleridge wrote: ‘This anachronic mixture of the Roman Republican, to whom Tiberius must have appeared as much a Tyrant as Sejanus, with the James-and-Charles-the 1st zeal for legitimacy of Descent, is amusing.’87 Hartley remembered this annotation in ‘Books and Bantlings’, where he wrote that in Sejanus Jonson had ‘committed a glaring anachronism’ by introducing ‘the sentiments and reasonings of King James’s court into that of Tiberius’.88 At one level, both Hartley and his father are simply commenting on an apparent historical slip in which a republican speaker is at odds with his monarchical subject-matter. But at another, more vitally, the drama’s concern with dynastic succession, the passing on of power between the generations, here finds its expression in the descent of the annotation from father to son: though a strict scholarly accounting might find this descent less than legitimate, the drama’s matter is here enacted in the very movement of the criticism. The drama, debating succession and inheritance, finds itself to be that very inheritance: its subject is at one with the use made of it by Coleridge and Hartley. Still more evidently indebted is Hartley’s essay on ‘Shakspeare and his Contemporaries’, which again seems to take its terms from the margins of the Stockdale edition of Jonson’s Works. Discussing the necessity of ‘an absolute exclusion of self’ in successful dramatic writing (embodied, 87

S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, iii. 178. H. Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia, i. 91. He adds: ‘Ben’s loyalty, however, is strongly tinged with laureate-sack, though no doubt heightened by his natural aversion to the Puritans, whom it was morally impossible for any dramatic writer to love.’ 88

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for Hartley, by Shakespeare), the essay turns to the contrasted failures of ‘Ben Jonson, the best of the playwrights, and Fletcher, the first of the dramatic poets after Shakspeare’.89 If Hartley equably distributes his father’s annotations on Jonson between the two dramatists, the provenance of his remarks is not thereby disguised. Compare Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Jonson’s characters (my first quotation) with Hartley on Fletcher’s (my second): Shakspeare’s comic personages have exquisitely characteristic features; however awry, disproportionate, and laughable they may be, still like Bardolph’s nose, they are features. But Jonson’s are either a man with a huge wen, having a circulation of its own, and which we might conceive amputated, and the patient thereby losing all his character; or they are mere wens themselves instead of men,—wens personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouths cut out, mandrake-fashion.90 They are not only caricatures, but caricatures of single features, and those features are all Fletcher’s own. They possess indeed a life derived from the poet, but it is rather the life of wens and excrescences, than of a full-formed and healthy offspring.91

Ought Hartley’s observation to be considered ‘a full-formed and healthy offspring’ of his father’s marginalia? Or is it rather a ‘caricature’ of the earlier note? Paternity is again at the very centre of the problem: it is something of an irony, and something more than a coincidence, that such moments of filial borrowing should occur at moments when the subject-matter of the borrowing should so illuminate the process by which it is borrowed. Both Hartley and his essay possess precisely ‘a life derived from the poet’: indeed, their difficulty lies in finding a mental life of their own; both take up a single feature of the father’s work and reproduce it, almost to the point of parody. Such moments make uncomfortable reading, none more so than when, in a fragment of autobiography, Hartley Coleridge reflected that he was ‘as strange in the wide world as if he were like the mammoth and megestherion, a relic of a perished system’.92 It is a devastating piece of self-judgement, all the more painful for the terms of its comparison being 89

Ibid. ii. 362. S. T. Coleridge, Literary Remains, ii. 278–9; the text is given literatim in idem, Marginalia, iii. 182. 91 H. Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia, i. 362. 92 H. Coleridge, ‘Autobiography of a Quizz’, cited, without the connection being noticed, by Judith Plotz, ‘The Annus Mirabilis and the Lost Boy: Hartley’s Case’, Studies in Romanticism, 33 (1994), 181–200. 90

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derived from his father’s description of Jonson as ‘like the Mammoth and Megatherion fitted & destined to live only during a given Period’.93 Coleridge’s ‘fitted & destined’ is a damning touch in literary criticism; to find a related effect in Hartley’s autobiography is chilling. But Jonson could offer less petrific effects. For Hartley Coleridge became publicly a poet not only under the voice of his father, but under Jonson’s voice also. Hartley’s life and his poems are placed under his father’s name, and his father’s proleptic imagining of what that life would hold, in the first—and, as became evident, the only—volume of his Poems, published in 1833.94 Poems opened with a ‘Dedicatory Sonnet’ to his father: Father, and Bard revered! to whom I owe, Whate’er it be, my little art of numbers, Thou, in thy night-watch o’er my cradled slumbers, Didst meditate the verse that lives to shew, (And long shall live, when we alike are low) Thy prayer how ardent, and thy hope how strong, That I should learn of Nature’s self the song, The lore which none but Nature’s pupils know. The prayer was heard: I ‘‘wander’d like a breeze,’’ By mountain brooks and solitary meres, And gather’d there the shapes and phantasies Which, mixt with passions of my sadder years, Compose this book. If good therein there be, That good, my sire, I dedicate to thee.95

Hartley’s reference in the first line of the sonnet’s sestet, set off by his diligent quotation marks and made clear by his confirmatory endnote, was to ‘Frost at Midnight’. The ‘Preface’ that followed this remarkable poem elaborated on such a scrupulous sense of obligation: Wherever I have been conscious of adopting the thoughts or words of former, especially living writers, I have scrupulously acknowledged the obligation: but I am well aware that there may be several instances of such adoption which have escaped my observation. It is not always easy to distinguish between recollection and invention. At the same time, be it remembered, that close resemblance of phrase or illustration, or even verbal identity, may arise from casual coincidence, in compositions that owe nothing to each other.96

93 94 95

S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, i. 61. H. Coleridge, Poems (Leeds: F. E. Bingley, 1833). 96 Ibid. p. [iii]. Ibid. p. vi.

Allusive Jonson, II

217

What does the ‘Dedicatory Sonnet’ owe to the ‘Preface’? Partly, at least, that strict accounting of debt and borrowing which is structured by a sense of what is owed, and what it is to owe. So too the paternity of the ‘Dedicatory Sonnet’ is carried through into the literary ‘adoption’ of the ‘Preface’; and the ‘resemblance’ that links ‘Frost at Midnight’ with the ‘Sonnet’ is familial in the strongest way.97 But what is most striking about Hartley’s poem is that its first two lines should themselves be owed unacknowledged to another such meditation on paternity and literary adoption, Jonson’s epigram ‘To William Camden’: camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in arts, all that I know, (How nothing’s that?) to whom my countrey owes The great renowne, and name wherewith shee goes Then thee the age sees not that thing more grave, More high, more holy, that shee more would crave, What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things! What sight in searching the most antique springs! What weight, and what authoritie in thy speech! Man scarse can make that doubt, but thou canst teach. Pardon free truth, and let thy modestie, Which conquers all, be once over-come by thee. Many of thine this better could, then I, But for their powers, accepts my pietie. (Epigram 14, H&S viii. 31)

The opening lines of Jonson’s fourteen-line poem—a sonnet in couplets—stand aurally behind Hartley’s declaration, the epigram’s first two rhymes, owe and know, opened out to enclose the octave of the later sonnet, emblematically framing such owed knowledge. It is hard, likewise, not to hear in Hartley’s ‘Bard revered’ and in his ‘little art of numbers’ something of Jonson’s ‘reverend head’ and the ‘arts’ he owes to Camden. But the allusion carries more weight than such glancing hearings, more force than the identical first-line ending; for, as Richard S. Peterson has demonstrated, Jonson’s lines already sound with

97 Compare Hartley’s related observation in ‘Books and Bantlings’: ‘Adopted books are as common as adopted children; many a work has been fathered falsely, many a one, in legal phrase, is nullius filius; and here and there it happens that literary parents, as well as natural ones, endeavour to pass off their proper offspring for foundlings’ (Essays and Marginalia, i. 85).

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a choir of classical declarations of obligation.98 Hartley’s poem extends this recursive line of obligation, as it deftly incorporates him into a larger poetic community: it is an acutely turned allusion, not the less effective in its filial piety for being so quietly made. 98 Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 60–1.

Conclusion

In the preceding pages I have provided a series of closely contextual readings in Jonson’s reception; their interest has been (I hope) a matter of their particularity, the closeness of their attention to the contexts, the texts, and the stages in and on which Jonson was received and reinterpreted through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whether in the associations and affiliations of Waldron’s annotated exempla of The Sad Shepherd, the theatrical, critical, and editorial accounts of Jonson’s reception, or the specific local contexts and resonance of Coleridge’s, Southey’s, and Hartley Coleridge’s adaptations and use of Jonson, I have aimed throughout to provide the richly textured means for our better understanding of both Jonson and those by whom he was received. None the less, these local forms of attention have their meaning only within larger patterns, for all we might argue that they have that meaning only as they are understood to be heuristic constructions, each the product at every point of the specific and the irreducible. But heuristic or not, such patterns are evident, and they form the long perspectives within which my study falls. Jonson’s theatrical presence continued into the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Macready continued to perform Jonson through the 1830s; he recorded in his Diary for 23 July 1838 rehearsing and performing Kitely at the Haymarket: ‘acted it pretty well’, he thought.1 The anonymous reviewer for The Theatrical Examiner agreed, praising Macready’s ‘masterly skill’ and the ‘subtle touch of nature’ given to one interchange with Cob.2 Such a continued presence in Jonson’s plays returns some of the vitality to Macready’s engagements with Jonson that had been sapped in the previous year when, on 13 October 1837, he recorded in his Diary: ‘Coming home, tried to read an adaptation of Volpone, but fell asleep, overpowered with fatigue of mind and body.’3 1 Macready’s Reminiscences, and Selections from his Diaries and Letters, ed. Sir Frederick Pollock, new edn. (London: Macmillan, 1876), 454. 2 The Theatrical Examiner, 29 July 1838; quoted in R. V. Holdsworth, ed., ‘Every Man In his Humour’ and ‘The Alchemist’: A Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), 137. 3 The Diaries of William Charles Macready, 1833–1851, ed. William Toynbee, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912), i. 417.

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Macready had had a long day; it must remain uncertain whether Jonson was the cause of the fatigue or simply suffered by it. Charles Dickens’s amateur revivals of Every Man In his Humour at Miss Kelly’s theatre in London in September 1845 and the Theatres-Royal at Manchester and Liverpool in July 1847 also benefited from Macready’s long familiarity with Jonson’s play. Dickens’s enthusiastic marshalling of cast, properties, and expertise in preparation for the earlier performances are vividly captured in his letters; his consultation with Macready over his role as Bobadil inform the Victorian Jonson on the stage by the lights of his Romantic past. ‘Do you think Bobadil is humble before the Justice, or still carrying it off in his swaggering way?’, Dickens asked Macready on 2 September 1845, eventually conceding to Macready’s and John Forster’s conception of the humble Bobadil with what he described in a later letter as ‘the worst grace in the World’.4 Mary Cowden Clarke recalled the minute attention of Dickens’s performance—‘the very height of fun’—in her Recollections. She was invited to take the part of Tib in a further revival by Dickens’s amateur company in May 1848; her markedup copy of Every Man In, carefully annotated through her few scenes, still survives.5 Dickens’s inquisitive asking after stage tradition sits oddly alongside his estimation of the play and his chosen part: ‘I don’t think its [sic] a very good part, and I think the comedy anything but a very good play. It is such a damned thing to have all the people perpetually coming on to say their part, without any action to bring ’em in, or take ’em out, or keep ’em going.’6 Not until T. S. Eliot would Jonson’s ‘not so much skill in plot as skill in doing without a plot’ be more positively valued.7 But critical and theatrical attention to Jonson could be more benign than this. Leigh Hunt, the beneficiary of the 1847 performance of Every Man In his Humour at Liverpool, had offered generous extracts from Jonson’s works in Imagination and Fancy, published in 1844: they signal 4 Dickens to Macready, 2 Sept. 1845 (The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, 10 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002), iv. 368). 5 Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1878), 304, 310–11; her copy of Every Man In his Humour . . . With Remarks, Biographical and Critical, by D—G (London: John Cumberland, [n.d.]), now Brotherton Collection NCC JON, Leeds University Library, is inscribed at the foot of the title-page: ‘copy used by Mary Cowden Clarke | for the performances of the Amateur | company in 1848.—’. 6 Dickens to Macready, 18 Sept. 1845 (Letters of Charles Dickens, iv. 382). 7 First published in The Times Literary Supplement, 13 Nov. 1919, pp. 637–8; repr. in ‘Ben Jonson’, in Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 155.

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a continued critical interest in Jonson, alongside the theatrical.8 Hunt printed selections from Cynthia’s Revels, Volpone, The Alchemist, The Sad Shepherd, The Masque of Queens, and Oberon; and in his ‘Critical Notice’ diffidently praised Jonson for his ‘fancy’, a quality Hunt found present ‘in far greater measure than his imagination’. Hunt’s account locks itself into the critical judgements of the previous sixty years: he recalls Thomas Warton’s discussion of Milton’s borrowings from Jonson and disagrees with Hazlitt’s account of Jonson’s ‘pedantry’ in ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’.9 Hunt discussed Volpone (again) and the Epigrams in Wit and Humour (1846). Launching a biographically inflected reading of Jonson’s career, Hunt admired the ‘scorn and spleen’ of ‘To My Muse’ (Epigram 65), but argued again that the engagement of Jonson’s plays with the particular limited them: ‘the characters are too much absorbed in the peculiarity, so as to become personifications of an abstraction.’10 But if the tendency of Hunt’s criticism is expected, his source for much of it perhaps is not: in April 1846, Hunt had borrowed the first volume of Gifford’s edition, presumably in preparation for his own work.11 If such a borrowing does not counteract the virulence of his earlier attacks on Gifford in The Examiner and Ultra-Crepidarius, it is evidence of the massive influence of Gifford’s editorial conception of Jonson through the remainder of the century. Critical responses to Jonson after 1816 were also unavoidably responses to the edited Jonson. Gifford’s was the Jonson for the nineteenth century. Barry Cornwall’s single-volume stereotyped edition (1838) reprinted Gifford’s text (without annotation) and replaced his ‘Memoir’ with a new account. Cornwall’s new biography recognizes the structuring importance of Gifford’s ‘Memoir’ and treats with acuity the force of his title-page epigraph: ‘although not strictly a sample of the biography itself,’ he writes, ‘it announces the spirit in which it is written.’12 The stereotyped plates of 8 John Moore’s marked-up copy of Every Man In from the 1847 Liverpool benefit performance is now Folger Shakespeare Library, Prompt E 15; it includes cast and property lists, and a part-book for Justice Clement. 9 Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy; or, Selections from the English Poets (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1844); cited from The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. Robert Morrison, Michael Eberle-Sinatra et al., 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), iv. 73–4. 10 Leigh Hunt, Wit and Humour, Selected from the English Poets (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1846); cited from Selected Writings, iv. 188–9. 11 David H. Stam, ‘ ‘‘A Glutton for Books’’: Leigh Hunt and the London Library, 1844–46’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 6 (1998), 149–89. 12 The Works of Ben Jonson, with a Memoir, ed. Barry Cornwall [Bryan Waller Procter] (London: Edward Moxon, 1838), pp. ix–x.

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the 1838 edition were employed by the publisher Moxon again in 1853, though here, perhaps under the influence of Alexander Dyce, whose notes correct and update many of its emphases, he returned Gifford’s ‘Memoir’ to print.13 In 1856, Robert Bell’s edition of Jonson’s Poetical Works preserved the poems Gifford had inserted in The Underwood ‘for the sake of uniformity’.14 Dyce and Bell’s work sparked a recurrence of interest in Jonson in the journals: The British Quarterly Review, unable ‘to perceive what manner of crime against private friendship or public morals’ might have been perpetrated, denounced the ‘rabid bitterness’ with which Gifford had attacked Drummond;15 W. C. Roscoe in The National Review thought it easy to understand how the ‘huge roistering poet from London’ might have ‘jarred on the nerves of the retired and musing sonneteer of Hawthornden’, and eminently explicable that after Jonson’s departure Drummond might have ‘set down his private impressions’—‘pithy words’ which, he remarked, ‘have stuck like a barbed arrow in the rear of his departing guest ever since’.16 At the end of the century, Francis Cunningham reprinted a lightly revised version of Gifford’s text in three volumes (1871) and contributed endnotes to a nine-volume reprint (1875).17 Not until 1952, when the last volume of Herford and the Simpson’s Oxford Jonson appeared, would a scholar looking for Jonson’s complete works have had a complete alternative to Gifford. Coleridge’s allusive associations with Jonson are more difficult of access. The literary energies at play in his Courier adaptations, or his application of Catiline to Southey’s Laureateship, are in some ways unquantifiable without a parallel attention to their emotional energies: in the latter example, the history of the personal relations between the two men; in the former, the import of Coleridge’s isolation in London from Sara Hutchinson. I am sceptical of, and so did not offer, a full psycho-biographical reading of the two allusively Jonsonian lyrics; but I wonder if, despite The Courier’s daily circulation in 1811 of ‘about 7500’, the poems’ intended audience comprised only one reader, Asra, 13

The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: Edward Moxon, 1853). Poetical Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Robert Bell (London: John W. Parker, 1856), 141. 15 The British Quarterly Review, 25 (1857), 185–320. 16 The National Review, 6 (1858), 112–47; repr. in The Eclectic Magazine, 44 (1858), 1–21; for the attribution, see Craig, ed., Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1990), 43 n. 86. 17 The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Francis Cunningham, 3 vols. (London: Hotten, 1871); The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Francis Cunningham, 9 vols. (London: Bickers and Son, 1875). 14

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whose voice their gendered discourse might perhaps invoke.18 The echoes Hazlitt heard in Remorse, the role Jonson played in defining responses to Southey’s Laureateship, and the echoes of his father’s lectures in Hartley’s prose, are also involved in the world as much as they depend on the word. They call upon later readers to bring allusion’s literary energies into play with the political and the familial, to recognize that Jonson, as well as shaping local moments in Romantic texts, can also shape larger patterns of thought and feeling. To recognize as much here, as with other poets’ allusions to Jonson, is a question of being prepared, in our own methodological predispositions, to offer to earlier writing a willingness that our work should be shaped by the objects we study, rather than shaping them to our prejudices and preconceptions. This, at least, I have tried to offer Jonson in the Romantic age, and by giving, to permit that association to ask again its own, fresh questions. 18 S. T.Coleridge, Essays on his Times in ‘The Morning Post’ and ‘The Courier’, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), i. p. cxlviii. Southey’s household certainly received the paper, Daniel Stuart apologizing later for its irregular appearance (Stuart to Southey, 1 July 1815 (NLS MS 2528, fol. 21r ) ).

Bibliography

MANUSCRIPTS

Manuscripts cited from printed sources are not listed here.

Beinecke Library, Yale University GEN MSS 298 vol. 2

Robert Southey commonplace book.

Bodleian Library, Oxford Dep. Hughenden 244/3 MS Douce.d.22 MS Eng. Misc. c.407

Isaac D’Israeli correspondence. Francis Douce correspondence. Richard Heber library catalogue.

British Library, London Add. Ch 66314 Add. MSS 9955–6 Add. MS 25383 Add. MSS 25390–2 Add. MSS 31974–5 Add. MSS 34567–8

S. T. Coleridge will. Charles Lamb dramatic notes. David Garrick correspondence. Isaac Reed, Notitia Dramatica. John Philip Kemble professional memoranda. Philip Bliss correspondence.

Edinburgh University Library MS La.II.422/141

James Bindley notes on Jonson.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC MS M.a.159 MS Y.c.2600 (194)

Robert Southey commonplace book. David Garrick correspondence.

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Huntington Library, San Marino, California MS Larpent 396

Charlotte Lennox, Old City Manners, Lord Chamberlain’s submitted manuscript.

John Murray Archive, London Uncatalogued correspondence, William Gifford to Octavius Gilchrist.

Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection MS Gen q SOU MS Lt 100

Robert Southey commonplace note. Anonymous York commonplace book, late eighteenth century.

National Art Library, London Dyce MS 39 MS F.48.F.16 MS F.48.F.38

F. G. Waldron continuation of Massinger, The Parliament of Love (1805). David Garrick correspondence. David Garrick correspondence.

National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh MS 2528 MS 866 MS 3877 Adv. MS 33.3.19

Robert Southey correspondence. Walter Scott correspondence Walter Scott correspondence. Sibbald transcript of Conversations with Drummond.

West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds MS GC/66a

Uncatalogued William Gifford to George Canning correspondence.

BOOKS WITH MANUSCRIPT

Bibliographical details for annotated exempla of books that appear later in the main listing of primary material are given here in shortened form.

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226

Beinecke Library, Yale University Im G289 771T Plays 735 Z64 220

The Tobacconist (1771), Tate Wilkinson promptbook. Epicœne (1776), John Genest copy. Ben Jonson, Q. Horatius Flaccus, His Art of Poetrie (London: John Benson, 1640), Alexander Pope–William Gifford copy.

Bodleian Library, Oxford Malone E 35

Octavius Gilchrist, An Examination (1808), Edmond Malone copy.

British Library, London 643.g.15.(1)

11777.c.23 C.45.c.4 C.61.f.1 C.182.a.1

F. G. Waldron, The Sad Shepherd (1783), George Steevens presentation copy, annotated by F. G. Waldron. George Colman, Ut Pictura Poesis (1789), interleaved and annotated promptbook. F. G. Waldron, The Sad Shepherd (1783), F. G. Waldorn interleaved and annotated copy. Ben Jonson, Works (1692), Ludwig Tieck copy. Ben Jonson, Works (1816), ed. Gifford, Ludwig Tieck copy.

Cambridge University Library Brett-Smith.a.9

Ben Jonson, Works (1692), David Garrick copy.

University of Delaware Library Special Collections, Folio PR2600.C16 1616

Ben Jonson, Workes (1616), David Garrick copy.

Elizabethan Club, Yale University EC + 13

Ben Jonson, Workes (1616), Yong–Dent–Gifford copy.

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Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC Prompt E 14 Promt E 15 PR 2260 1711 Cage Copy 2 fol. STC 14753 Copy 1 STC 14753 Copy 7 STC 14754 Copy 1 STC 14754a Copy 2

Every Man In his Humour (1769), Tate Wilkinson promptbook. Every Man In his Humour (1825), John Moore prompt copy. Drummond, Works (1711), Edmond Malone copy. Ben Jonson, Workes (1640), John Genest copy. Ben Jonson, Workes (1640), R. B. Sheridan (d. 1888) copy. Ben Jonson, Workes (1640/1), John Genest copy. Ben Jonson, Workes (1640/1), Joseph Warton copy.

Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection NCC JON

Every Man In his Humour (1825), Mary Cowden Clarke copy.

National Art Library, London Dyce 5090 and 1295

Dyce Tall 8◦ 5342 Dyce L8◦ 5365 Copy 1

Richard Hurd, A Letter to Mr. Mason; on the Marks of Imitation (Cambridge: W. Thurlbourn et al., 1757) and John Bowle, Reflections on Originality in Authors (London: R. Horsfield, 1766), William Gifford copy (2 vols. bound as 1). Ben Jonson, Works (1816), ed. Gifford, Alexander Dyce copy. F. G. Waldron, The Sad Shepherd (1783), F. G. Waldron annotated copy.

Theatre Museum, London Plays JON Prompt

Every Man In his Humour (1776) promptbook.

N E W S PA P E R S A N D J O U R N A L S B E F O R E 1 9 0 0

The Athenæum The Bath Journal Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine The British Critic

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The British Quarterly Review The Champion The Eclectic Magazine The Edinburgh Review The Examiner The Gentleman’s Magazine Hansard (The Parliamentary History of England) The London Magazine The Monthly Mirror The Monthly Review The Morning Chronicle The National Review The Observer The Oxford Magazine The Quarterly Review The Retrospective Review The Scotsman The Times The Town and Country Magazine; or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment The Westminster Magazine

P R I M A R Y S O U R C E S , I N C L U D I N G S E C O N D A R Y M AT E R I A L F I R S T PUBLISHED BEFORE 1900

A i k i n, L u c y, Memoirs of the Court of King James the First, 2 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1822). A n d e r s o n, R o b e r t, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, 14 vols. (London: John & Arthur Arch et al., 1793–1807). A n d e r s o n, W. E . K ., ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & Robert Anderson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). [Anon.], An Authentic Narrative of Mr. Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage (London: John Miller, 1817). The Biographical Mirrour, comprising a series of ancient and modern English portraits, of eminent and distinguished persons, from original pictures and drawings, 3 vols. (London: S. and E. Harding, 1795–1812). The Favourite, An Historical Tragedy (London: John Bell et al., 1770). Playhouse Pocket-Companion; or, Theatrical Vade-Mecum (London: Richardson and Urquhart, 1779). The Thespian Dictionary; or, Dramatic Biography of the Eighteenth Century (London: T. Hurst, 1802).

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A u s t e n, J a n e, Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). A y s c o u g h, S a m u e l, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum (London: the author, 1782). B a k e r, D av i d E r s k i n e, The Companion to the Play-House, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket et al., 1764). B e au m o n t, F r a n c i s, and F l e t c h e r, J o h n, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96). The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Henry Weber, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1812). B o a d e n, J a m e s, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., 2 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1825). Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1827). B r o w n s m i t h, J ., The Dramatic Time-Piece; or, Perpetual Monitor, Being a Calculation of the Length of Time Every Act Takes in the Performing (London: J. Almon, T. Davies, and J. Hingeston, 1767). B r y d g e s, S i r S a m u e l E g e r t o n, Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, with Original Disquisitions, Articles of Biography, and Other Literary Antiquities, 10 vols., 2nd edn. (London: Longman et al., 1815). B u r k e, E d m u n d, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). B u r n e t t, G e o r g e, Specimens of English Prose-Writers, from the Earliest Times to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1807). Specimens of English Prose-Writers, from the Earliest Times to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn. (London: John Bumpus, 1813). B u r n e y, F r a n c e s, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), ed. Warren Derry, 10 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–85). B y r o n, G e o r g e G o r d o n, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1975–82). The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). C a m p b e l l, T h o m a s, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834). ed., Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols. (London: John Murray, 1819). C h a l m e r s, A l e x a n d e r, ed., The General Biographical Dictionary, 32 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1812–17). ed., The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, 21 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1810). C h a l m e r s, G e o r g e, A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers (London: Thomas Egerton, 1799).

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Index

Adams, J. Q. 6 afterlives 5, 29–30, 147 Aikin, Lucy 91 allusion 144, Chs. 5–7 Amaltheus, Jerome 170 Anacreon 71, 170 Anderson, Robert 24, 76–7, 95, 158–9, 169, 209 antitheatricality 9–10, 60–2 Ashton, T. S. 161 n. assignats 162–3 Austen, Jane 1 n. Ayscough, Samuel 78–9 Baer, Marc 53 n. Baker, David Erskine 67 Baker, Herschel 97 n. Ballantyne, John 83, 111 Bank of England 161 n., 163–4 Barker, Nicolas 16 n. Barton, Anne 2, 74, 136 Bate, Henry 33–4 Bate, Jonathan 1 n., 31 n., 51, 116, 144, 149 Bate, W. Jackson 144 n., 211 n. Bawcutt, N. W. 10 n. Bayntun, binders 61 n. Beal, Peter 170 n., 185 n. Beale, John 101 Beaumont, Sir George 55–6, 59 Beer, John 148 n. Behn, Aphra 84 n. Bell, Robert 222 Bennett, Andrew 5 Bentley, G. E. 6 Bindley, James 95 n. Blake, William 11 Bland, Mark 105 n. Bliss, Philip 23, 99, 103, 106 Bloom, Harold 144 n. Boaden, James 34 n., 51 borrowing 141–2, 145, 152–3, 207; see also debt Boswell, James 108 Boswell, James the younger 111 Bouslog, Charles S. 157 n.

Bowle, John 98 n. Bradley, J. F. 6 Brady, Jennifer 206 n. Brewer, John 31 n. Briggs, Richard 79 n. Brinkley, Roberta Florence 151 n. Bristol Library 152 British Museum Library 79, 103–4, 106 n. Broadbent, J. B. 206 Brock, J. Heyward 105 n. Brown, Charles 137 n. Browne, William 190 Brownell, Morris R. 111 n. Brownsmith, J. 27 n. Brydges, Samuel Egerton 82 Bulmer, William 99, 106 Burke, Edmund 162, 166 Burke, Redmond 1 Burling, William J. 30 n. Burnett, George 81–2 Burney, Frances 59 Butler, Marilyn 181 n. Butler, Martin 7, 119 n., 136 n., 207 n. Byron, George Gordon, Lord 6, 204–5 Cain, Tom 105 n. Camden, William 187–8 Campbell, Jane 90 n. Campbell, Thomas 34 n., 89 Cannan, Edwin 161 n. Canning, George 10, 119–22, 202 Carew, Thomas 210–11 Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury 187 Chalmers, Alexander 86 n., 93, 110 Chalmers, George 80 n. Chan, Mary 158 n. Chapman, R. W. 64 n. Charles I, king of England 189–90, 214 Charlotte, queen of England 178, 189–91, 196–201 Chetwood, William Rufus 110 Churchey, Walter 41 n. Clapham, John 161 n. Clarke, R. B. 95–6 n. Clarkson, Catherine 193

252

Index

Clod, Random 167 n. Cobbett, William 168 Cole, George Watson 98 n. Coleridge, Derwent 206–8 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley 169 Coleridge, Hartley 144–5, 179, 205–19, 223 Poems 211, 216–19 Coleridge, Henry Nelson 208, 213 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 11, 12, 85, 130, 138, 143–5, Chs. 6–7, 222–3 library 76, 159 n., 177 Biographia Literaria 1–3, 155, 202 Christabel 155, 160–1 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 216–17 Lay Sermons 161 ‘Mutual Passion’ 143, 162, 171–6 Osorio 145, 146–50, 154, 159 Remorse 145, 146–50, 153–9 Sybilline Leaves 169, 171 ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree’ 172–5 ‘The Hour-Glass’ 162, 165, 169–70 ‘The Virgin’s Cradle-Hymn’ 168–9 ‘To William Wordsworth’ 156 Coleridge, Sara 206 n., 208 Collier, John Payne 90 n., 107 Colman, George, the elder 18–20, 46, 62 Epicœne (1776) 38–9, 50, see also Jonson, Ben, Epicœne Ut Pictura Poesis 41–3 Colman, George, the younger, 32 commonplace books 46 n., 183–9 Connell, Philip 165 n. Cooke, G. F. 51, 54 ‘Cornwall, Barry’ [B. W. Procter] 59, 84, 212, 221–2 Cottle, Joseph 149 Cowden Clarke, Mary 220 Cowley, Abraham 25, 65–6, 159 Craig, D. H. 6, 80 Croly, George 199 n. Cronin, Richard 80 n. Cumberland, Richard 71–3 Cunningham, Francis 106, 222 Curran, Stuart 189 n. Curry, Kenneth 183 n. Cutmore, Jonathan Burke 86 n. Davenant, William 181 Davies, Thomas 22, 29, 69–71, 152–3 De Bolla, Peter 163 debt 145, 153, 157, 163, 209; see also borrowing

Deelman, Christian 37 n. Dekker, Thomas 67, 84 n. Dennis, Thomasina 146 Dent, John 97 Dibdin, Charles 79 Dickens, Charles 220 Digby, Sir Kenelm 101, 135 Digby, Venetia 141–2 D’Israeli, Isaac 77, 106–8, 111 Dobson, Michael 37 n. Dodsley, Robert 64 n., 90 n. Domitian 128, 195 Donaldson, Ian 4 n., 5, 64 n., 65 n., 87 n., 90 n., 109 n., 122, 135 n., 181 n., 197 n. Donne, John 1, 6–7, 49 n., 66, 105, 159, 177 Douce, Francis 17 Dovastan, J. F. M. 71 n. Drake, Nathan 79–80, 88–9, 91–2 Drayton, Michael 74–5, 103 Drummond, William 107–10, 112–13, 170 n., 222 Dryden, John 66, 73, 81, 93–4, 130, 137 n., 143–4, 181, 196, 209–10, 211 n. An Essay of Dramatic Poetry 3, 44, 63 The Conquest of Granada 3 Duffy, Michael 48 n. Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse 41 n. Duggleby, Vincent 167 n. Dyce, Alexander 106 n., 222 Eastwood, David 181 n. echo 148–50, 153, 157–8 Ehrman, John 48 n. Eliot, T. S. 67, 76, 130–1, 143–4, 189–90, 220 Elizabeth I, queen of England 182 Ellis, George 75, 81 Empson, William 147, 194 n. Erdman, David 171, 200 Evans, Robert C. 12 n., 95 n., 101 n. Evans, Samuel 99 n. Fairer, David 1 n., 66–7 Farington, Joseph 55–6 Fish, Stanley 100 n. Fitzgerald, Percy 34 flattery 125–8, 196 Fleeman, J. D. 67 n. Fletcher, John 23, 138, 139–40, 215 Ford, John 86, 212 forgery 78, 81, 163–8, 178 Forster, John 220 Foucault, Michel 170 n.

Index Freeman, Arthur 110 n. friendship 10, 24–5, 92, 94, Ch. 4 Frost, D. L. 6 n. Fuller, Thomas 77, 82 n., 207 Furniss, Tom 162 n. Galignani, Jean-Antoine 120 n., 148 n. Gants, David L. 7 n. Garratt, Edmund 149 n. Garrick, David 17, 18, 20–1, 27, 29, 31–8, 45, 50, 55–6, 59 The Jubilee 30, 37–8 Garrick, Eva 59 Genest, John 33 n., 34 n., 50 n., 52, 61–2 Gentleman, Francis 122 The Coxcombs 44–5 The Tobacconist 44–6, 138 n. George III, king of England 189 Gifford, William 4, 8, 10, 12, 16 n., 23–6, 78, 83–91, 93–4, Ch. 4, 183, 185–90, 202, 212, 221–2 library 98 n.15 Gilchrist, Octavius 10, 25, 82–6, 88, 90 n., 93, 98–9, 102, 103, 108 library 82 n. Gill, Stephen 151 n. Gillman, Henry 198 Gillman, James 198, 208 Gilmartin, Kevin 168 n. Godolphin, Sidney 99–100 Godwin, William 48–9, 87–8 Grafton, Anthony 185 n. Green, Joseph Henry 208 Greg, W. W. 98 n., 101 n. Griffiths, Eric 211 n. Griggs, Earl Leslie 194 n. Hammond, Paul 136 n. Harbinson, Michael 137 n. Harding, Anthony John 2 n. Harris, P. R. 106 n. Hase, Henry 166–7 Havens, Earle 184 n. Haworth, Helen 85 n. Hazlitt, William 4, 10, 12, 42, 45, 49, 56–8, 97, 113–30, 138, 146, 149, 153–6, 161, 196, 202 A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. 122, 125–30 Characters of Shakespear’s Plays 116, 126 Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth 122, 126

253

Lectures on the English Comic Writers 113, 117, 146 ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’ 113–15, 117, 119, 121, 127, 221 Select British Poets 148 The Spirit of the Age 120–2, 127–8 Headley, Henry 74, 80 Heber, Richard 97–8, 111, 187 Herford, C. H. 6, 95, 222 Herrick, Robert 80 n. Hickey, Alison 194 n. Hill, Thomas 82 n., 103–4 Hinde, Wendy 120 n. Hoadley, John 35–6 Hogarth, William 42–3, 58 Hollander, John 148 Hopkins, William 31, 36 n. Horace 6, 72 Horner, Francis 161 Housman, A. E. 80, 102 Howell, James 6, 115 Hume, Robert D. 31 n. Hunt, Arnold 97 n. Hunt, Leigh 50, 52, 86, 118, 130, 138, 180–2, 220–1 Hurd, Richard 66 n., 98 n. Hutchinson, Francis 196 Hutchinson, Sara 156–7, 222

Inchbald, Elizabeth 54–5 inheritance 136, 145, 149, 159–60, 178–9, 201, 205–18 interleaved books Ch. 2, 28–9, Ch. 5 Ireland, John 119 Ireland, William-Henry 78, 81 Isaac, Peter 99 n.

Jackson, H. J. 16 n., 111 n. Jacobus, Mary 194 n. James VI and I, king of England 195–6, 214 Jardine, Lisa 185 n. Jeffrey, Francis 137–8 Jensen, Ejner J. 6 Jewett, William 201 n. Johnson, Mary Lynn 171 n. Johnson, Samuel 10, 22, 63–4, 65–9 Jones, Emrys 40 n. Jones, John 147 Jones, Stanley 118 n., 121 n., 126 n. Jones, Stephen 17–8, 78 n., 86

254

Index

Jonson, Ben adaptations –The Alchemist, lost adaptation (1782) 46–9; see also Colman, George; Gentleman, Francis; Lennox, Charlotte; and Penn, John character 24, 66, 70, 77, 79, 82–4, 87, 91–4, 109–10, 181–2, 222 Conversations with Drummond 75 n., 108–10 critical history Ch. 3 dedicatory practice 119 editorial history Ch. 4 First Folio (1616) 90 Latinisms 74–5, 124 n. ‘mechanic’ 3–4, 121–2 Mermaid Club 78, 92, 104–5, 138 poet laureate 179–83, 185–95, 200–2, 214 n., 222–3 posterity, BJ’s view of 5 Shakespeare 1, 16, 37–8, 63–4, 66, 68–70, 72, 74, 76, 80 n., 81–3, 88–9, 91–2, 113–16, 118, 214–15 ‘Sons of Ben’ 206 theatrical history Ch. 2, 219–21 theatrical legitimacy 38, 44, 51, 53–4 works: masques: Chloridia 4 Love’s Triumph through Callipolis 4 Oberon 221 The Masque of Queens 72, 221 plays: Bartholomew Fair 101, 114 Catiline 81, 178, 195, 198–205 Cynthia’s Revels 137, 147–8, 157–9, 181–2, 186, 191, 221 Eastward Ho! 93, 185 Epicœne 3, 20, 27, 30–44, 61–2, 63–4, 68, 73, 80, 187 Every Man In his Humour 3, 18, 20, 30–1, 41, 50–61, 69, 71, 114, 219–20 Every Man Out of his Humour 70, 186 Poetaster 78, 125 n., 151–2, 186–7 Sejanus 10, 81, 113, 116, 122–30, 148 n., 186, 199, 213–14 The Alchemist 18, 20, 36, 40, 51, 68, 69, 80, 84–5, 114–15, 117, 148 n., 221 The Case is Altered 84–5, 106, 164 The Devil is an Ass 101 The Magnetic Lady 4 The New Inn 77, 189, 210–11

The Sad Shepherd Ch. 1, 75, 84, Ch. 5, 148 n., 221 The Staple of News 101 The Tale of a Tub 185 Volpone 40, 41, 51, 68, 72, 79–80, 84, 114, 219, 221 poetry: Dubia ‘Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke’ 89, 103, 190–1; ‘Epitaph on Michael Drayton’ 103 Epigrams, as a collection 66–7, 101, 186, 211, 221; ‘On My First Daughter’ 207, 211; ‘On My First Son’ 207; ‘On Poet-Ape’ 80 n.; ‘To My Muse’ 187, 221; ‘To the Ghost of Martial’ 195; ‘To William Camden’ 217–18 The Forest, as a collection 101, 106, 186; ‘Song: To Celia’ 170 The Underwood, as a collection 73, 89, 100–7, 109, 145, 175, 186; ‘A Nymph’s Passion’ 142–3, 172–8; ‘An Epistle to Master John Selden’ 105, 118, 188; ‘An Epistle to Mr Edward Sackville’ 103; ‘An Execration upon Vulcan’ 212–13 n.; ‘Epigram to William, Earl of Newcastle’ 106; ‘Epistle Mendicant’ 189; ‘Epitaph on Master Vincent Corbett’ 103; Eupheme 141–2; ‘The Humble Petition of Poor Ben’ 189; ‘On a Lover’s Dust’ 169; ‘The Mind’ 141; ‘The Mind of the Frontispiece to a Book’ 105; ‘To Master John Burges’ 179 Ungathered Verse: ‘A Speech at Tilting’ 103; ‘A Vision on the Muses of his Friend Michael Drayton’ 103; ‘An Answer to Alexander Gill’, 75; ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’ 4, 60–1; ‘Ode to Himself’ 189–90; ‘On the Honoured Poems of . . . Sir John Beaumont’ 103; ‘To his Much and Worthily Admired Friend, the Author’ (Cynthia’s Revenge) 103; ‘To My Chosen Friend . . . Thomas May Esq.’ 103; ‘To My Dear Son . . . Master Joseph Rutter’ 103; ‘To My Old Worthy Servant . . . Mr Richard Brome’ 103; ‘To my Truly Beloved Friend, Master Browne:

Index On his Pastorals’ 103; ‘To My Worthy and Honoured Friend, Master George Chapman’ 103; ‘To My Worthy Friend, Master Edward Filmer’ 103; ‘To the Memory of my Beloved . . . Mr William Shakespeare’ 103, 207; ‘To the Worthy Author, Mr John Fletcher’ 103; ‘To the Reader’ 103 prose: Discoveries 5, 73–4, 81, 85 n., 102, 205–6 The English Grammar 102 Jonsonus Virbius 98–100, 102 Juvenal 72 Kean, Edmund, 28, 45, 50, 55–9 Keats, John 11–12, 115, 130, 137–8, 171 Kelliher, Hilton 107 n. Kemble, John Philip 30–1, 38, 50–1, 97 library 97, 110 ‘Old Price’ (OP) protests 53–4 Kemble, Stephen 41 Kermode, Frank 6–7, 15 n. Kett, Henry 74 n. King, Edward 197–8 Kinservik, Matthew J. 40 n. Kirkley, Harriet 22 n. Kucich, Greg 2 n. Laing, David 108 Lamash, Philip 36 Lamb, Charles 1, 84–6, 164, 176–7, 184, 209 Langhans, Edward A. 46 n., 52 n. Larpent, James 45 n., 153 Lau, Beth 16 n. Leader, Zachary 171 Le Grice, C. V. 166 n. Lennox, Charlotte, Old City Manners 45 Lipking, Lawrence 42 n. Loewenstein, Joseph 119 n., 148 n. Loftis, John 40 n. London Philosophical Society 196 Love, Harold 96 n., 171, 184 n. Lucan 47 Lynch, Jack 2 n. Lynn, Andrew 100 n. McCalman, Iain 8 n. McCarthy, William 65 n. Macready, W. C. 27–8, 50, 57–60, 219–20 McGann, Jerome J. 8–9, 168, 171, 174 Mack, Maynard 98 n.

255

McKenzie, A. D. 163 n. McKenzie, D. F. 8–9, 15–16, 23, 96 n. McIntyre, Ian 59 n. Mahoney, Charles 116 n. Malone, Edmond 75–6, 78, 82–3, 89, 93, 108–9, 180 Manilius 102 n. marginalia 1, 3, 16–17, 19–23, 27–9, 31, 46, 61–2, 85, 109, 111–12, 138–40, 151–2, 156–7, 164, 194–5, 203, 209, 213, 215 Martial 195 Mason, John Monck 152 Massinger, Philip 130 n., 152–3, 211–12 A New Way to Pay Old Debts 50, 57 Mays, J. C. C. 144–5, 153 n., 154, 169 Merivale, Herman 191–2 Miller, Jonathan 29 Millgate, Jane 83 n. Milner, Henry M. 199 n. Milton, John 2, 138, 144, 153, 221 Comus 22, 138 ‘L’Allegro’ 63 ‘Lycidas’ 197–8 Paradise Lost 150–2 Sonnet 16 197 Moir, D. M. 137 n. money 145, 161–8, 177, 179–80, 188–9, 193 Moody, Jane 31 n. Moore, John 221 n. Moore, Thomas 40 n., 212 Moxon, Edward 212, 222 Mudford, William 198 Murray, John 6 n., 26 n., 83 n., 86–7, 89, 98 n. Napoleon Bonaparte 161 Neu, Elizabeth 112 n. Neve, Philip 22, 75 Newdigate, B. H. 101 n. Newlyn, Lucy 2 n., 144 n. Newton, Richard C. 101 n. Nichols, John 22–5, 73–4 Nicol, George 26, 95 Noyes, Robert Gayle 6, 29, 40 n. Parker, Reeve 148 n., 197 n. Parks, Stephen 97 n. Patmore, P. G. 126 Patterson, Annabel 105 n. Penn, John 43–4 Pepys, Samuel 32–3 Perry, Gill 35 n. Perry, Seamus 7 n.

256

Index

Peterson, Richard S. 144 n., 217–18 Philostratus 71 Pie, Sir Robert 179 Pitt, William, the younger 47–9, 120 Piozzi, Hester Lynch 111 plagiarism 80–1, 114, 156–7, 159–60 playbills 31, 41, 52, 54 n., 57, 59 Plotz, Judith 215 n. Pocock, J. G. A. 162 n. poet laureate 179–83, 185–95, 200–2, 214 n., 222–3 Pollin, Burton R. 1 Poole, Thomas 149 Pooley, Julian 22 n. Pope, Alexander 6, 98 n., 159 Pratt, Lynda 195 n. presentation copies 16, 79 n., 83–4, 97, 110–11 Preston, William 95 promptbooks 27–9, 45–6, 52, 59, 220–1 Pye, Henry James 179–81 Quintilian 5 Raleigh, Sir Walter 104–5 Rawlinson, D. H. 96 n. Redford, Bruce 40 n. Reed, Isaac 22, 67–9, 86, 89, 90 n., 103 Reynolds, John Hamilton 138 n. Rhodes, R. Crompton 39 Ricardo, David 162–3 Rickman, John 155 Ricks, Christopher 11, 144 n., 145, 159–60, 179, 206, 209 Riggs, David 109 n., 182 Ritson, Joseph 71, 170 Robinson, Charles E. 148 n. Robinson, Henry Crabb 57, 85, 112, 117 Roe, Nicholas 1 n., 138 romanticism 7–8, 144 Roscoe, W. C. 222 Rosenfield, Sybil 55 n. Rowe, Nicholas 47 Rulfs, Donald J. 10 n. Russell, Gillian 9, 48, 53 n. Russell, John 116 Saintsbury, George 189 n. Schiller, Friedrich 157, 168 Schlegel, A. W. 93–4, 121–2 n. Schoenbaum, Samuel 105 n. Scott, Walter 60–1, 82–4, 89, 95, 108, 111, 179

library 83 n. Scott-Warren, Jason 96 n. Seneca 181–2 Shakespeare William 37–8, 52, 63–4, 115, 150, 168, 201, 214–15 works: A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3 As You Like It 48 Coriolanus 115–17 Hamlet 155 1 Henry IV 69 2 Henry IV 69 Henry V 92 Henry VIII 69 Julius Caesar 85 King Lear 199 Love’s Labour’s Lost 63 Macbeth 72 Othello 110, 170, 199 Romeo and Juliet 127 Shawcross, John T. 2 n. Sherbo, Arthur 106 n. Sheridan, R. B. 39–40, 47–8, 50, 149, 153–6 The Critic 48, 156 The School for Scandal 39–40 Shiels, Robert 109–10 Shine, Helen 86 n. Shine, Hill 86 n. Sibbald, Robert 108 Siddons, Sarah 32–5, 37 Sidney, Sir Philip 73 Simmons, Jack 193 n. Simpson, Evelyn 105 n. Simpson, Percy 6, 44, 105 n., 222 Smith, William 192–3 Southey, Cuthbert 184 Southey, Robert 89 n., 144–5, 157, 178–200, 219, 223 library 183 ‘An Ode on the Death of Queen Charlotte’ 197–8 A Vision of Judgement 190, 204 Carmen Nuptiale 190 Carmen Triumphale 181 ‘Funeral Song’ 189–92 Wat Tyler 192–5 Spenser, Edmund 2, 22, 181, 209 Stam, David H. 221 n. Steevens, George 16, 82 Stockdale, John 76, 86, 95, 177, 198, 213 Stone, George Winchester 31 n. Storey, Mark 193 n.

Index Strachan, John 111 n. Street, T. G. 195 Stuart, Daniel 154, 176–7, 223 Suarez, Michael F., SJ 25 n. Surrey Institution 117, 126, 129 Swinburne, A. C. 6 Tanselle, G. Thomas 9 n. Tave, Stuart M. 70 n. Taylor, John 97, 110, 164 Thelwall, John 1–2, 123, 130 Tieck, Ludwig 111–12 Trimpi, Wesley 90 n. Tuite, Clara 9 Tunnicliffe, Stephen 96 n. Van Draat, P. Fijn 40 n. Virgil 64, 135–6, 192 Waldron, Francis Godolphin 8, 12, Ch. 1 76, 78, 80, 98, 110, Ch. 5, 219 library 25, 98 theatrical parts 18 The Sad Shepherd (1783) 9, Ch. 1, 73, 104, Ch. 5, 219 Warter, John Wood 183, 185–6

257

Warton, Joseph 73, 81, 180 Warton, Thomas 10, 22, 65–7, 93, 221 Weber, Henry 86 West, Anthony James 81 n. West, Shearer 35 n. Whalley, Peter 21, 23–4, 76, 89, 95, 102, 104, 106, 141, 170 n., 190 library 25 n. Wheatley, Henry B. 39 n. Wilkinson, Tate 30, 40, 45–6, 52 Wittreich, J. A. 2 n. Wolfe, Heather 33 n. Wood, Anthony 23 Woof, R. S. 146 n. Wordsworth, Dorothy 159 n., 193, 211 n. Wordsworth, William 11, 156, 159 n., 170 Lyrical Ballads 80 Worrall, David 129 n. Woudhuysen, H. R. 184 n. Wrangham, Francis 86 n. Wu, Duncan 74 n., 118 n., 151 n. Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition 5