MIRIAM JACOBSON. Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England.

Abstract

Miriam Jacobson’s ambitious and valuable new study of early modern English poetry offers a fresh and promising approach to well-travelled texts. By devoting each chapter to a key link between the controlling metaphors of these poems and imported materials and concepts from the ‘barbarous’ East, Jacobson develops a robust method for working through her complex thesis: the poets of the 1590s and 1600s ‘negotiated their vexed relationship to classical antiquity by engaging with and appropriating non-Western culture through words and imagery associated with Mediterranean and Asian imports’ (p. 7). The book’s busy introduction—as much concerned with Agamben and Latour as with Ovid and Sandys—thus makes way for a streamlined set of well-contextualized readings, which should engage and excite both early modernists and scholars of cultural materialism more broadly defined. The book’s opening chapters deal respectively with Ben Jonson’s semi-ironic hostility toward exotic ‘inkhorn terms’ and George Puttenham’s surprising association of English poetry with edible ‘subtleties’ crafted from imported sugar. Though the texts chosen—Jonson’s translation of Horace, his commonplace book, and the ponderous comedy Poetaster , as well as Puttenham’s much-discussed Arte of English Poesie —portend a drab trek over familiar ground, Jacobson offers fresh and vital readings of each, and fares especially well with Poetaster . Her account reinvigorates a play too easily reduced to a shrill summary of Jonsonian classicism, shifting focus away from the celebrated Roman poets and onto the immediate objects of Jonson’s satire—a city awash in tawdry imports and a vernacular under assault by ‘neologisms, manufactured archaisms, and imported language’ (p. 29). At the heart of this reading we find the ribald, irrepressible Jonson of the Epigrams and Bartholomew Fair , and Jacobson’s own prose grows colourful in turn; Jonson’s adulterous Chloe, for instance, becomes ‘a messy smear of expensive, imported pigments, ointments, perfumes, and aphrodisiacs all deriving from bodily and seminal fluids’—a walking, neologism-spouting ‘ arse poetica ’ (p. 45).