In about seven to eight months, I will take take my doctoral comprehensive exams: four tests in four weeks. For the past few months, or even the past year, I have been studying for these tests, reading primary and secondary texts in order to prepare for the insanity and stress that will surely infiltrate my being come September. Honestly though, the stress has already started to manifest itself in the form of nightmares and cold sweats; I'm very afraid to see what happen when the tests get closer. With that said, as I read texts, I want to use this space to collect immediate thoughts on what I just read. The thoughts will not necessarily be well thought out; they, in essence, will be initial reactions to the readings. I hope to post thoughts every day (that is very ambitious) or at least every other day. Let the madness begin.
Ben Jonson
This semester, I have been auditing a class on major authors of the British Renaissance. Up to this point, we have read five plays by Thomas Middleton, a few of John Donne's devotions, and various excerpts from John Milton. Along with these texts, I have started looking at Ben Jonson's plays (my first introduction to him). Earlier in the semester, I read Volpone (1605-06), a play that displays avariciousness at its most extreme. Volpone, since he has no heirs, decides to entertain himself by pitting three who desire his fortune against one another. Feigning death, Volpone has one of the men disinherit his son and he even has another one, Corvino, give him Celia, Corvino's wife. Comedy transpires, and the avarice nature of Volpone, Corvino, Carbaccio, and Voltore leads to their punishment at the end of the play.
Since I read this play about a month and a half ago, I do not have fresh thoughts in my mind about it; however, over that past few days, I have read Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609) and Bartholomew Fair (October 31, 1614). Reading these plays, I couldn't help but think about carnival and the carnivalesque. I assume I did this because this last weekend, and today, we celebrated Mardi Gras in south Louisiana. At any rate, specifically while reading Epicoene, I continually thought about the inversions found in carnival. The play centers around Morose and his nephew Dauphine. Morose has disinherited Dauphine, and Dauphine devises a way to return to his uncle's will. The whole of the play involves tricks, jests, and masks that work to reinstate Dauphine and some of the jests just serve as entertainment for the company of knights and collegiate ladies, nothing more.
In Epicoene, the two items that caught my attention in regards to carnival occur with the masking and with the inversion of gender roles. Masking, in the play, occurs throughout. However, one of the most evident links to carnival comes with the masking of Thomas Otter, a sea captain. In Act V, Morose wants to divorce, or at least annul his recent marriage to Epicoene. To see if this would be possible, Truewit, a knight who devises most of the jests in the play, tells Morose that he will find a diviner and a canon lawyer. Truewit disguises Otter as a diviner and Cutbeard, a barber, as a canon lawyer. During carnival, the sacred, or the natural order, becomes inverted. Down becomes up and vice versa. In this case, a lay person becomes a member of the clergy. Along with these masks, the key mask comes in the form of Epicoene (having the characteristics of both sexes). Throughout the play, Morose, and the audience, perceives Epicoene as female. However, this could not be further from the truth. She is, in fact, a boy dressed as a woman. Dauphine places the boy in a position to marry Morose. Through this trickery, Dauphine regains his inheritance from his uncle.
Epicoene's unmasking at the end also plays into the inversion of gender roles that run rampant throughout the play. The knights, La Foole and John Daw (Epicoene's servant), should be brave and masculine men; they, however, are effeminate. While trying to have fun at La Foole and Jack Daw's expense, Clerimont says,
whiniling dastard, Jack Daw! But La Foole, a brave
heroic coward! And is afraid in a great look and a
stout accent. I like him rarely. (IV.v 244-47).
In contrast to the effeminate knights, the play contains strong, masculine women in the form of Thomas Otter's wife and Lady Haughty's collegiate ladies. Mistress Otter continually reminds her husband of her role in the marriage and how he should treat her. She repeatedly says that he needs to treat her as a princess. When he converses with the knights, away from Mistress Otter, Otter, being egged on by the knights, berates and puts down Mistress Otter. Overhearing his comments about her, Mistress Otter berates Otter and beats him in public. As for the collegiate ladies, the main thing I can think about with them deals with masking. Truewit, and other knights, even one of the ladies herself, Centaure (I believe), discusses the mask, make up, that a woman puts on to appear in public. The main inversion of gender roles comes in the form of Epicoene himself/herself. Since this boy takes on the characteristics of a woman, a strong woman at that, Epicoene serves as a masked character and an inverted one, in regards to gender roles. While I have not had the chance to read it yet, I am interested in reading David Cope's article discussing Epicoene and Thomas Middleton's The Roaring Girl: "Cross Dressing with a Difference: The Roaring Girl and Epicoene."
As for Bartholomew Fair, I am interested in the use of rhetoric, specifically when it comes to the disputation scene between Cokes and the puppet in Act V. Along with this, something may be made out of the carnival setting, Bartholomew's Day. Win, Littlewit's wife, is pregnant, adding to the carnivalesque imagery. The play contains comments on body parts and bawdy humor, both elements of teh carnivalesque. Another aspect of this play that I find interesting in the portrayal of Puritans. Jonson portrays Busy, to a certain extent, as a fool. His arguments against certain vices do not make much sense.
In conclusion, at least for now, I want to mention the connection between these two plays and Sir Philip Sidney. At the beginning of Epicoene, in a prologue, Jonson writes,
The ends of all who for the scene do write
Are, or should be, to profit and delight.
Of course, the purpose of poetry, and rhetoric for that matter, to teach and entertain comes from Horace. However, Sidney draws upon Horace and uses these two purposes in his Defence of Poesy. I would not mention this had it not been for the mention of Argalus, a character from Sidney's Arcadia in Bartholomew Fair. Since I am testing in British Renaissance and Rhetoric, I am interested in looking into the use of Horace in British Renaissance literature. I do not know, off the top of my head, the number of times Horace pops up in the two Jonson plays I have just discussed. That is all for now. Below, you will find a video of David Bevington discussing the collected works of Ben Jonson, enjoy.
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