Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition by Douglas Duncan

Abstract

dius, like Dawson’s, was playing upon his audience by exploiting the cere­ monial qualities of political utterances. In general, Dawson is a shrewd observer of the relationship between lan­ guage and values. Thus, after quoting Troilus’s speech of disillusionment and analysing his mode of expression, Dawson can draw a telling inference: “His is an essentially reladvist position which he tries to shore up with the seem­ ingly absolute demands of honour.” The discussion of All’s Well includes a sensitive account of the wide gap which separates the incantatory magic of Helena’s couplets and the deflationary materialism of Parolles’s prose. Quite rightly, Parolles becomes a comic precursor of Edmund: “the humour arises out of the very attitudes which make him dangerous, his view of nature, for example, which is essentially Hobbesian.” And in The Winter’s Tale, the world of purity which the two kings shared — the world without women — is exposed as a fraudulent haven: “ Polixenes’ words reveal a basic fear and distrust of women, an attitude that plagues both Leontes and himself.... And such ‘innocence’ among grown men can be brutal and dangerous.” Here at last is a critic writing on subjects that interest him: the shabby relativism of Troilus, the engaging but empty materialism of Parolles, the brutal innocence of Leontes and Polixenes. These modes of valuing, and the ways in which they are implied in dramatic language, are no doubt the ques­ tions at issue when Professor Dawson teaches Shakespeare to undergraduate students. For their sakes, I hope so. O f the three Professor Dawsons darkly visible in this book, I infinitely prefer the third. Less trendy than the student of audience response, less runic than the seeker of illusions, he is (in his modest way) undeniably real. ronald h u ebert / Dalhousie University Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). viii, 252. $24.95 Appearing exactly sixty years after T. S. Eliot’s marvellously succinct, judi­ cious, and prophetic essay on Jonson, Professor Duncan’s book positively asks to be considered in the light of what has happened to Jonson and his work in the interim. Eliot’s opening is as memorable as it is just. He writes: The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be 357 afflicted by the imputation of virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries — this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval. (Selected Essays, p. 147) Dr. Johnson himself, whose voice can be detected behind that verdict, could not have put the matter better. “Yet,” Eliot continues with an unwonted optimism, “ there are possibilities for Jonson even now.” But for these possi­ bilities to be realized a number of requirements would have to be met, in­ cluding an “intelligent saturation in his work as a whole,” “a clearer under­ standing of his ‘rhetoric’ and its applications,” and, above all, “the power of setting Jonson in our London,” as distinct from “putting ourselves into sev­ enteenth-century London.” The extensive programme that Eliot outlined has been largely fulfilled, at least in the academic world, bringing with it many of the results he hoped for. The masques are no longer neglected; the connections between the plays and the non-dramatic poetry have been explored and established; and, most important of all, the major comedies are back in the commercial theatre, not, admittedly, as often as one might wish, but often enough to make one realize that the theatrical qualities which Eliot saw in them are indeed there. The decisive shift came in 1937 with the publication of L. C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson. Paradoxically yet rightly, Knights heeded one of Eliot’s injunctions by disregarding another. He set Jonson in the England of the thirties by putting himself and his readers into seventeenth-century England, by emphasizing the long tradition of native drama and popular thinking that lies behind the plays...