Envy, Eunoia, and Ethos in Jonson's Poems on Shakespeare and Drayton

Abstract

Envy, Eunoia, and Ethos in Jonson's Poems on Shakespeare and Drayton Marlin E. Blaine In the character sketch that concludes his transcript of conversations with Ben Jonson, William Drummond of Hawthornden states that Jonson "is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and Scorner of others";1 many of Drummond's contemporaries concurred with this description. Like his conversation, Jonson's poetry contains praise of self and vituperation of others, but it also pays numerous lavish compliments to a variety of recipients—a third discursive category absent from Drummond's dichotomy. Yet the scornful character that Drummond attributes to him creates complications for some of Jonson's encomiastic verses, especially those he writes about other poets. I mean neither to restate the often-argued thesis that Jonson, motivated by jealousy and insecurity, finds a way to aggrandize himself when he purports to be praising others nor to join the chorus of critics who rebut that argument. Rather, I intend to examine the way Jonson explicitly reckons with his reputation as a scornful egotist when he sets out to laud a fellow author, a reputation that he knew could undermine his credibility as a generous praiser of the other's work.2 In rhetorical terms, Jonson struggles with the problem of ethos, that aspect of persuasion that rests on the character of the speaker. Jonson [End Page 441] had a grand reputation for talent, learning, and discriminating critical judgment, but his peevishness and egotism made him seem, to observers like Drummond, unwilling to grant other authors their due. Yet, as a leading figure in the Jacobean literary world, Jonson was often called upon to contribute commendatory verses for published books as well as to compose other forms of epideictic verse for his colleagues. As he constructs his ethos in encomiastic verses to other poets, Jonson often augments his self-representation as a critic with extraordinary attempts to create a persona that will be perceived as being motivated by good will or, in the Aristotelian terminology that I will use in this essay, eunoia. The word that Jonson habitually struggles with in this context is "envy," which in early modern English retains much of the sense of its Latin root invidia and denotes not only the resentment of others' good fortune, as it does today, but also a more general sense of malice or ill will (OED, s.v. "Envy," n. 1), including the scorn and contempt observed by Drummond. By tracing the idea of envy in Jonson's commendatory poems, we can document his awareness that his ability to praise other poets has become compromised by his own reputation; in addition, we can see that the disavowal of envy functions as a fundamental structural principle in two of Jonson's best-known encomia of other authors: his poems on William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton. The invidious character attributed to Jonson has certainly influenced criticism of the Shakespeare elegy and, more generally, criticism of Jonson's life and oeuvre. Richard S. Peterson has analyzed the scholarship on the Shakespeare elegy as marked by three competing arguments: that it offers "generous and unequivocal" praise; that its "decisive lack of sympathy" for Shakespeare's work is "thinly veiled by a respect for the public occasion"; and that it combines "generosity and reserve" in assessing Shakespeare's writing.3 The fullest account of Jonson's poetics of envy in the Shakespeare elegy is that of Roger B. Rollin, whose essay stresses Jonson's ambivalence and hence would fall into the third category. Rollin's Bloomian psychological approach stresses Jonson's "unconscious strategies for coping with envy" and explicitly subordinates rhetorical analysis to a "phenomenological perspective."4 George E. Rowe has analyzed Jonson's competitive personality in the contexts of [End Page 442] humanist modes of education, which encouraged writers to attempt to outdo other authors, and of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical world, in which a large number of talented writers inspired many ambitious authors to attempt—often hostilely—to set themselves apart from the crowd.5 (Rowe acknowledges, however, that Jonson did so more than most.) And scholars such as Russ McDonald and Ian Donaldson have written intriguingly of Jonson's...