Suburb Humours and Civic Metamorphosis in Ben Jonson’s Every Man In 2

Hi Everyone:

This is an overlong abstract that I drafted as if for the CCLA panel that José and Stephen have proposed, even though I won’t be able to take part in that conference next May. José and Stephen kindly suggested that I post it now to the blog. So here it is! I welcome comments and suggestions, and will try to take account of them in time for the report that José has suggested I give via Skype at the March 10 group meeting in Montreal.

Thanks!

Mark.

Suburb Humours and Civic Metamorphosis in Ben Jonson’s Every Man In

Every Man In His Humour (first staged in 1598, first printed in a quarto of 1601) heads the file of Ben Jonson’s Works in the 1616 Folio edition, in a version probably dating in the main from 1605. Hence it bears a special burden in the case to be made for Jonson as both a civic dramatist in the classical Roman mould—a role signalled for him by the prominent image of a semi-Colosseum-like structure labelled THEATRUM on the title-page—and an agent for the “conversion… of [the] follies” of his own time (so styled by Francis Beaumont in preliminary verses a few pages later). This paper returns to the well-worn traces of the 1605 revision of the play, which transfers its scene from a vaguely imagined Florence (despite odd references to the Mermaid Tavern and English coinage) to a much more concretely realized present-day London (where, intriguingly, the Mermaid in Cheapside yields to the Windmill in Old Jewry, one of the most historically built-up and conversatile of all sites documented in John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London [1: 278, ed. Kingsford]).

Like others before me, I am interested in seeing how that displacement “fits in with Jonson’s early experiments in the use of an English setting” for his plays (J. W. Lever). In particular, I want to try to locate the place-shifted Every Man In of 1605/1616 more precisely within the similarly shifting civic and theatrical discourses around the suburbs or Liberties of London, as elucidated by Steven Mullaney—following in Stow’s footsteps but with scarce reference to Jonson aside from Bartholomew Fair—in The Place of the Stage: Licence, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (1988). In the process, I hope to join the conversation recently engaged by Stephen Wittek (in this blog) with J.-C. Agnew and Hannah Arendt about the early modern city as newly self-constituting public locus for radical shifts or turns in individual or collective subjectivity. What courses may Jonson, sometime bricklayer and mechanical (cf. Yelda Nasifoglu’s post on Hooke), be found laying for London as a new-style “theatre of conversion”? To put it another way, by what turns does one get from the Colosseum to the Globe or Rose?

I will begin near the end of the play, where the previous scenes’ steadily mounting discourse of “turns,” “devices,” “exchanges” and “translations” culminates—in the 1605/1616 version—in the shape-shifting Brainworm’s triumphant declaration to his master, the elder Kno’well, “Oh sir, this has been the day of my metamorphosis!” (5.1.146, ed. Lever). At the corresponding point in the Quarto version, in a much longer speech recapitulating his day’s work, Brainworm’s precursor Musco recalled how “being somewhat more trusted of [his] master… and knowing his intent to Florence… [he] did assume the habit of a poor soldier in wants; and, minding by some means to intercept his journey in the midway, ‘twixt the grange and the city… encountered him.” In place of that merely formulaic “journey in the midway,” the Folio version offers a much more topographically evocative traversal of Moorfields between Hogsden (Hoxton) and the City, then enables an audience or reader—Stow in one hand and the “Agas” map in the other, if necessary—to plot the path taken by the “suburban” characters through Moorgate, down Coleman Street to the Windmill and Kiteley’s house in the Old Jewry. (For the other terms in my title, see 1.2.114-16: “it will do well [the disposition of Stephen, the gull from Hoxton way] for a suburb-humour: we may have a match with the city, and play him for forty pound.” Neither the contrast of suburb/city nor the prospect of “playing” matched gulls for a paying public are in the 1598/1601 text.) “It’s but the crossing over the fields to Moorgate,” says the younger Kno’well. But what does he know? It is in those suburban fields—the contested “commons” or Liberties in which lay the Curtain where the original Every Man In His Humour was performed in 1598, near the Hoxton fields where Jonson in the same year killed his fellow actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel—that Brainworm, hired man, extempore soldier of fortune, all-knowing master of turns, “translated [as he says of himself] from a poor creature to a creator,” sets in train the main action of the play (in 2.2-3).

What can Brainworm’s turns in the “skirts of the city” (3.2.218) tell us about Jonson’s emerging sense of the socially transformative possibilities of an English public drama squarely situated in its contemporary London locale? How far might they serve as a practical substitute for the encomium of poetry excised from the Folio edition of the play? What is their relation—in the larger economies of the 1616 Works and of Jonson’s life’s work—to the author’s dedication of Every Man In His Humour to William Camden, author of a Britannia then newly translated into English by Philemon Holland (1610)? Somewhere behind all these questions, needless to say, lies another about the significance for Jonsonian and Jacobean “cognitive ecologies” of Jonson’s religious conversions—to Roman Catholicism while in prison in 1598, then back to the Church of England some twelve years later. As Ian Donaldson points out, in his superb Ben Jonson: A Life (2011), “Throughout his long career Jonson was to retain many of the natural instincts of the border dweller: the capacity above all, in his moral and professional life, to shift ground while professing to have remained forever in the same spot” (57).