Byron: The Critical Voice by Bruce Wallis

Abstract

482 English Studies in Canada to listen to him." Jonson's self-created image as the first great professional man of letters England had produced breaks into several roles. We have Jonson the empiricist whose "faith in things" and in facts produced Sejanus and Catiline, two tragedies founded on the persuasive power of historical fact. We have as well the familiar image of Jonson the castigator of rascals and fools, and the less understood image of the celebrator of heroes who found his heroes in his own time and country and who discovered a hero new to his age - the writer himself. It is fitting that a writer so preoccupied with ethos should be honoured with the recognition that his greatest created character was himself. If our recovery of this character depends, as Partridge observed at mla, on a new full-scale biography that takes into account the whole of Jonson, then Partridge's essay is a fit beginning to this task. Other needs in Jonson scholarship, according to Partridge, Waith, and others at mla, are for studies of the relationship between the non-dramatic poetry and the drama and criticism; the relation between Jonson and his audience; how Jonson resolved his plays; the contradictions between his theory and his prac­ tice; his various roles in the poems and plays; his attitude toward language, his interest in etymology and in names. As Alan Dessen remarked, we need a critical bibliography of Jonson. As well, we need a computerized concordance; a Jonson chronology and a calendar of his works; new editions of his less-known plays; a commentary on the poems, indeed, a new edition and commentary on all his works. Some of these projects are already in progress (Richard Levin is working on the Jonson criticism). Attention to such needs and to productions of Jonson's plays will extend the commemorative urge beyond the quadricentennial . NOTES 1 William Blissett, Julian Patrick, R.W. Van Fossen, eds, A Celebration of Ben jonson: Papers Presented At The University of Toronto in October 1972 (Toronto 1973); Mary Olive Thomas, ed, Ben jonson: Quadricentennial Essays, Studies in The Literary Imagination, vol vi, no. 1 [April 1973] (Atlanta 1973) annette DREW-BEAR / University of Montreal Bruce Wallis, Byron: The Critical Voice, 2 vols, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, no. 20, (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur 1973). xxix, 196; 296 [197-493] Great poets are very rarely great critics as well, but it seems to have been conceded that in the company of his contemporaries Byron was no critic at all. He wrote no Biographia Literaria, no Defence of Poetry, and no specially 483 Reviews illuminating preface to his ballads, lyrical or otherwise. Moreover, he did not seem to take literature as seriously as his contemporaries, either as a writer or as a reader. "Who would write, who had any thing better to do?" (1813 Journal, 24 November) is more than an idle quip.1 This is not to say that Byron was not a serious writer nor that his criticism is to be dismissed; indeed, both his poetry and his criticism are frequently serious antidotes to the vatic intensity of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, his principal critical pieces - the letters to John Murray on the Rev Bowles's misguided view of Pope and the letter to Black­ woods (unpublished until after his death) justifying Don Juan - give us less insight into the corpus of his own work and into the central literary evolutions of his own time than the major critical essays of the period. The reader looking for such insight must, therefore, go to the letters and journals and to the poems and gather together for himself all the fragmentary comments on a particular critical issue (taking care not unduly to abstract such comments from their contexts). He must also take into account (with even more care) what Byron is alleged to have commented by Moore, Medwin, Trelawney, and a host of others. Then he must piece the fragments together. The exercise is not unlike that of making a kaleidoscope, and what Professor Wallis attempts in Byron: The Critical Voice is to collect all the bits of Byron's many-coloured glass...