Victoria Moul, Jonson Horace and the Classical TraditionJonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. Victoria Moul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. vii+248.

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Previous articleNext article FreeVictoria Moul, Jonson Horace and the Classical Tradition Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. Victoria Moul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. vii+248.Sara van den BergSara van den BergSaint Louis University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is a critical commonplace, based on comments by Ben Jonson and his contemporaries, that he modeled himself on the Roman poet Horace, but no scholar has fully explored the extent of Jonson’s indebtedness until now. It is appropriate that this study was conducted by a classicist, someone thoroughly familiar with the works of Horace. Victoria Moul focuses on different dimensions of Jonson’s debt to Horace: imitation, allusion, and translation. In chapters on Jonson’s odes, epigrams and epistles, and verse satire, she shows how Jonson’s work reflects Horace’s rivalry with Pindar, Martial and Seneca, and Juvenal. In a chapter on Jonson’s Poetaster, a play set in classical Rome and explicitly dealing with relationships in the community of poets, Jonson created as his own surrogate the character of Horace, who triumphs over the Virgilian and Ovidian modes of Roman poetry. That classical contestation mirrors Jonson’s own rivalry with the poets of early modern London. In Horace, Jonson found not only a model for himself but also, as Moul argues, an author he could construct as a model and thereby ensure his own place in the early modern English “culture of translation” (192).Jonson’s work, like that of his classical predecessor, is distinguished by a complex intertextuality. “Competing classical voices” in Jonson’s texts are the materials from which he constructs “an authorial voice that compares, judges and even claims to outdo his classical sources” (6). In her chapter on Jonson’s indebtedness to Horace and Pindar in the genre of the ode, Moul cites not only entire poems but quotations from Horatian odes in Jonsonian epigraphs and allusions in poems of other types. However, she is primarily concerned to demonstrate that Jonson relied on Horatian precedent throughout his career and that his odes not only reflect Horace’s attempt to overgo Pindar but document his own attempt “to emulate and out-do Horace” (53). Jonson’s ambition for poetic authority is nowhere more in evidence than in the odes that celebrate other people. Yet she could have made more of the irony that several of these poems—the ode to Sir Philip Sidney, the Cary-Morison ode—deal with the discrepancy between unfulfilled expectation and the poetic act of celebration. Sidney died before the poem was published and Morison before the poem was written. Moul could also have made more of the famous disjunctive “Ben/Jonson” that jumps off the page for any reader of the Cary-Morison ode. She cites three of the many critics who have offered an interpretation of Jonson’s unusual incorporation of himself into the poem but ventures no extended reading of her own. A more general problem for any reader interested in Jonson’s poetic self-presentation lies in Moul’s decision to isolate Jonson’s Horatian odes without regard to their placement. As several critics have noted over the years, The Forrest contains a number of poems written about or to members of the Sidney family, and the collection as a whole would benefit from being seen as Jonson’s exploration of ways to honor the Sidneys in the way Horace honored his patrons. Moul’s decision to write each chapter on individual genres gets in the way of any general argument about a collection like The Forrest, a miscellany of different poetic genres: epigrams, epistles, odes, and songs. Instead, one must look in different chapters for her comments about individual poems.A reader could expect more of a unified thematic argument in the chapter on epigrams, since Jonson gathered more than a hundred poems together under that generic umbrella in the 1616 folio edition of his works. Indeed, the chapter shows that “liberty” is the thematic core of Jonson’s Epigrams. The theme derives from the Horatian source of “Inviting a Friend to Supper” (Ep. 101), a poem that builds on elements of form, theme, and detail found in epigrams by Martial. One of the most original segments of this chapter is the discussion of the poems to Sir Thomas Roe and Sir John Roe. Moul discusses not only Jonson’s debt to Horatian texts but also the thematic progression and the historical occasions of these poems.In discussing Jonson’s appropriation of Horace’s epistles, Moul argues that Horatian praise and grace are set against Juvenalian satire. The Horatian relationship between the poet and his subject (e.g., the Countess of Rutland or Lady Katherine D’Aubigny) redeems them from the world that warrants Juvenalian condemnation. In making this claim, Moul distinguishes the early stance of Horace from his “vatic” confidence in the odes. At the same time, she carefully notes that the satiric material in the verse epistles, notably “To Penshurst,” “challenges our reception of the speaking voice of the poem” (126). Jonson’s critique of his own presence in the poem replicates the self-critical presence of Horace in his satiric poetry. Unlike Juvenal, Horace implicates himself in what he satirizes; that self-awareness lends both force and a kind of rueful tolerance to Horatian satire. I was puzzled by the apparent misreading of the moment in “To Penshurst” when Jonson, enjoying dinner, is pleased that no man “tells my cups” (line 67, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982]). Moul, citing Juvenal, interprets this to mean counting the goblets to make sure they are all there (130). I think it more likely that Jonson modifies his source to mean the number of drinks he consumes, a reading that would parallel his reference to his gargantuan appetite and his denial that the waiter “doth my gluttony envy” (line 68).When Moul turns to The Poetaster, she develops the argument of other critics that the play is about the act of translation. Moul describes the play as a “network of parallels” (158) between characters in the play, between classical texts and Jonson’s script, and between the classical plot and the contemporary London literary scene populated by Marlowe, Dekker, Marston, and Shakespeare. Above all, she focuses on the relationship between Jonson and Horace. Jonson is both self-confident as Horace and submissive to Horace (136). Cultural authority in the play is vested in Horace, she argues, much as Jonson wanted to claim cultural authority for himself. Moul’s argument rises to its highest level of originality and sophistication when she offers a close reading of the final act of the play, when Virgil offers a reading of the tale of Dido and Aeneas. Moul links this reading both to Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and to the love of Ovid and Julia in Jonson’s play. Virgil, the preeminent Roman poet, at first entrance seems to be “a Marlovian version of his own Aeneas” only to end with a literary device “derived not from his own work, but from Horace’s” (167). This twist fulfills a Jonsonian ideal, rendering the Virgilian ideal text as dependent on a Horatian model. Jonson, Moul argues, achieves an act of “extended translation” (174).The final segment of the book, an analysis of Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Ars poetica, takes a neglected text and makes it genuinely important to any reader of Ben Jonson and of early modern English literature. The Horatian theory of poetry as utile et dulce may be at once familiar and unfashionable, but, in an era when literary criticism seems to have lost cultural authority, both the Horatian ideal and Jonson’s version of it have renewed urgency. Moul shows how Horace complicates and clarifies what it means to judge a literary text and also the way that Jonson repeatedly expands the Horatian idea of pleasure (183). Jonson published two versions of his translation in 1640, the first composed in 1604. In other works, he repeatedly cited the Ars poetica. Moul’s central argument is that Jonson created a model of Horace on whom he could model himself. Like the Horace he so admired, Jonson found freedom and autonomy in a social system of patronage and a poetic system of imitation and emulation.Victoria Moul’s work is marked by a critical intertextuality, as she alludes to other Jonsonian scholars who have noted Jonson’s involvement with classical texts. The index to the book, however, does not serve her well. The minimal index excludes not only references to contemporary critics (e.g., Stanley Stewart, “Jonson’s Criticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart [Cambridge University Press, 2000], 175–87, quoted by Moul on 178) but also references to classical poets in the body of the text (e.g., Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anacreon [14]). Even significant references to some Jonsonian works, notably Sejanus (2, 6), go unremarked. These omissions make it difficult to access and assess the full range of Moul’s argument. Nonetheless, her book provides a way for readers to understand not only the importance of Horace and classical literature for Ben Jonson but also the importance of literary and critical intertextuality for interpretation today.One other example can represent the important contribution Victoria Moul has made in restoring the importance of literary history to our understanding of Ben Jonson’s sense of his work. She offers a major reading of “An Epistle of Edward Sackvile, now Earle of Dorset,” a Senecan text that adopts a Horatian structure to clarify the poet’s complicated claims of indebtedness and freedom (81–88, 181–82). Jonson, like Horace, had to negotiate poetic freedom within the context of a patronage system. Jonson does so by claiming for himself “the power to immortalise” not only his subjects but language itself (182). His real obligation, therefore, is not to his patrons but to language.Victoria Moul brings her sense of intertextuality into the present in her conclusion, citing the important but often neglected relationship between Ben Jonson and Thom Gunn (211–16). Gunn’s brief but indispensable appreciation of Jonson’s poetry as well as his own poem, “An Invitation,” which emulates Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” show that an “occasion” can be both a source and an opportunity for poetry. For Gunn, as for Jonson, the “more remov’d mystery” of the literary source creates a textual relationship that is evoked by the immediate occasion of a new poem. That linkage between literary history and social immediacy gives poetry a special force, both to renew the past and to enrich the present. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 2November 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/667867 Views: 220Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.