Wasting Time in Ben Jonson's Epicoene

Abstract

[T I| a ime, declares Truewit in Epicoene's opening scene, because it is an incorporeall thing, and not subiect to sense, we mocke ourselues the fineliest out of it.' For all its incorporeality, though, is of the utmost importance for Epicoene and Jonson's poetics generally. Time anchors the conceptualization of the proper re lationship between nature and art at the center of Jonson's neoclassical poetics. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson does not oppose his art to a De vouring time from whose rival pen he seeks to rescue the objects of his poetry.2 In both his epideictic poetry and his satire, Jonson seeks mimetically not to rival but to imitate time. Jonson's poetry of praise and those whom Jonson praises imitate an idealized and patriarchal version of natural time: cyclical yet productive, natural balances stasis and change to provoke awareness and acceptance of temporal finitude. Jonson directs his satire against those who through various arts-from poetry to cosmetics-seek to escape natural for other, artificial and effeminizing temporal horizons characterized by disrup tion, sterility and waste. Epicoene is an extended and complex example of such satire. Its fictional world is a consumer society in which what is ultimately consumed is time; the satiric selves who inhabit this fictional world do not imitate but deny nature and natural time, fashioning them selves through a poesis that runs away from nature to occupy an artifi cial temporal horizon constituted by the wasteful and seemingly ster