Sejanus and the People's Beastly Rage

Abstract

tators, chastened by the play's satire, to translate the fantastic commonwealth of Gargaphie into a real commitment to the virtues embodied by Cynthia, Arete and Crites. The poet's place in this is clear: he stands at the side of the monarch, and his work both articulates the values of the commonwealth and defends it against its enemies. Whatever one thinks about Jonson's personal investment in Crites and the implications for a young playwright seeking royal patronage, Cynthia's Revels is unquestionably a grand statement of what Jonson imagined as the role of the theater in civilized society. Volpone is vastly different. There we marvel at creatures whose use of theater is entirely self-serving, who enthrall their audiences only to rob and vex them. In the epistle dedicating the play to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Jonson echoes Crites as he preaches the impossibility of any mans being the good poet, without first being a good man and the need to inform men, in the best reason of liuing, but the play itself is ambivalent about such ideals. Our fascination with Mosca and Volpone and our sense that their creator must have known this fascination himself suggest that theater which seeks to affirm the value of a commonwealth based on majesty, virtue and learning was for Jonson an increasingly problematic venture. Sejanus is an important document in this phase of Jonson's development. It explains a great deal about his psychological investment in his work and about how that investment produced a tumultuous relation between stage and gallery in the playhouse. At