Ben jonson in the romantic age

Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age


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Ben Jonson in the
Romantic Age
TOM LOCKWOOD

1


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For my parents
and for Beck


Acknowledgements

This book developed out of a suggestion made by Ian Donaldson; in
the Ph.D. thesis he then supervised at Cambridge and subsequently my
indebtedness to him has been as great as such a thing ever should be.
My examiners, Jonathan Bate and Simon Jarvis, helped me to see how
that thesis might become a book; both at earlier and later stages, my
teachers at Girton College, Juliet Dusinberre, Anne Fernihough, and
James Simpson, read parts of my work and showed me how it might be
undertaken. As Jonson writes finely in Discoveries: ‘I thanke those, that
have taught me, and will ever.’
At Leeds, David Fairer, Robert Jones, and John Whale have all commented on at least one chapter; I am grateful for conversations with
Michael Brennan, Martin Butler, and David Lindley; and Paul Hammond, besides other kindnesses, helped me to think through the shape
and purpose of the book. The comments of David Bevington and my
two other (anonymous) readers at Oxford University Press have enabled
me to improve my final text; Sophie Goldsworthy and Andrew McNeillie
have encouraged me through the process of that improvement. Jacqueline
Baker, Tom Perridge, and Jean van Altena have expertly guided the book
into print. Any errors that have survived are mine.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, who funded my doctoral work, and latterly the
British Academy, whose award of a Postdoctoral Fellowship has allowed
me to complete work on the book. I am grateful also to the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington,
DC, for the award of visiting fellowships that enabled me to work with
their collections; the School of English at the University of Leeds has also
supported my research.
For permission to quote from manuscript and printed material in
their care I am grateful to the following institutions and individuals:
the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Bodleian Library, University
of Oxford; the British Library, London; Cambridge University Library; Special Collections, University of Delaware Library; Edinburgh
University Library; the Elizabethan Club, Yale University; the Folger
Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC; the Huntington Library, San

Acknowledgements

vii

Marino, California; the John Murray Archive, London, and Mrs Virginia
Murray (Archivist); the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library;
the Leeds Library; the National Art Library, London; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Theatre Museum, London; the West
Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, for the Earl and Countess of Harewood
and Trustees of the Harewood House Trust; and York Minster Library.
It is a pleasure to thank severally the staff of these and other libraries for
the courtesy extended to me during the course of my research.
An earlier version of material presented in Chapters 2 and 6 was published in The Library; I am grateful to the Council of the Bibliographical
Society and the journal’s editor, Oliver Pickering, for permission to use
this material.
Without the support of my parents, Chris and Roy, my sister, Rosie,
and my brother, Joe, this research would not have been possible; without
Beck, though, it would have been miserable; and Daniel has provided a
very strong incentive to bring it now to a close.
Tom Lockwood
Leeds, September 2004


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Contents

Abbreviations and A Note on Texts

x

Introduction: Romantic Jonson, Marginal Jonson

1

I

THEATRE, CRITICISM, EDITING

13

1. Francis Godolphin Waldron and The Sad Shepherd, I

15

2. Theatrical Jonson

27

3. Critical Jonson

63

4. Editorial Jonson

95

II

ALLUSION AND IMITATION

133

5. Francis Godolphin Waldron and The Sad Shepherd, II

135

6. Allusive Jonson, I: Coleridge

146

7. Allusive Jonson, II: Coleridge, Southey, and Hartley
Coleridge

178

Conclusion

219

Bibliography

224

Index

251

Abbreviations and A Note on Texts

1756
1811
1816
BL
Disc.
DNB
F
H&S

JMA
NAL
NLS
OED
Q
Und.
UV
WYAS

The Works of Ben. Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley, 7 vols. (London:
D. Midwinter et al., 1756)
The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley and
Alexander Chalmers (London: John Stockdale, 1811)
The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. William Gifford, 9 vols.
(London: G. and W. Nicol et al., 1816)
British Library
Discoveries
Dictionary of National Biography

Folio
Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson,
11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52); u/v and i/j
regularized in all quotations
John Murray Archive, 50 Albermarle Street, London, W1X
4BD
National Art Library
National Library of Scotland
Oxford English Dictionary
Quarto
The Underwood
Ungathered Verse
West Yorkshire Archives Service, Leeds

Quotations from Jonson’s texts vary their source chapter by chapter,
as indicated, in order to give a better sense of Jonson’s changing shapes
through the years of my study; if quotation is from an earlier edition, an
additional reference to H&S is supplied.
All quotations from Shakespeare follow the text of The Complete
Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), unless a particular reading is under discussion, when reference is
given according to the Through Line Numbering (TLN) established by
Charlton Hinman, The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare,
2nd edn., rev. Peter W. M. Blayney (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).


Abbreviations and A Note on Texts

xi

With a single exception, discussed below, transcriptions from manuscript sources and from manuscript annotations to printed books are
given literatim, and employ the following conventions:
[-deletion]
\interlineation/
[supplied], sup[plied]
[. . .]

A reading deleted in the manuscript
A reading interlined in the manuscript
Words or letters supplied due to paper loss in
the manuscript
Material omitted in transcription

The single exception to this practice is that quotations from printed
sources for the manuscripts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge follow the
conventions established by his editors.


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Introduction: Romantic Jonson, Marginal Jonson

‘Ben Jonson is surely an exception.’ The assertion is John Thelwall’s,
one of many written in the margins of his heavily annotated copy of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in the years following
its publication in 1817.1 It is a comment made within a very specific
set of contexts, by no means all of them Jonsonian: contexts that are
social, political, and personal, as well as historical and bibliographical.
As the annotation needs to be understood in a given time and a given

location, the moment of its inscription in the margins of Thelwall’s
copy of the Biographia, it needs also to be located within the contexts
of Thelwall’s difficult, changed relations with Coleridge over some
twenty years.2 But Thelwall’s contention, ‘Ben Jonson is surely an
exception’, has broader and still largely unexamined force. By locating
Jonson in the margin of the Biographia, one of the central texts of the
Romantic age but one from which he is otherwise excluded, the marginal
interjection is emblematic of a larger truth: that for too long, Jonson
has been thought different from his contemporaries and successors in
having no influence upon the literary culture of the Romantic age. His
presence, when allowed at all, is assumed apparently to be precisely
exceptional.
Is a Romantic Jonson merely, as here literally, a marginal Jonson?
Where Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere, part of the very constitution
of Romantic life (and its political and social texts), Jonson has been
thought absent;3 where Donne, his exact contemporary, was recovered
by Romantic readers, Lamb and Coleridge among them, Jonson has

1
Burton R. Pollin and Redmond Burke, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of
Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970), 73–94.
2
Nicholas Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: The Road to Nether Stowey’, in Richard
Gravil and Molly Lefebure, eds., The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas Macfarland
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 60–80; Thelwall as an annotator is further discussed in
David Fairer, ‘ ‘‘A little sparring about Poetry’’: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–8’, The
Coleridge Bulletin, ns 21 (2003), 20–33.
3
The sentiment is that of Austen’s complacent Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park,
ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 279); it provides a point of

intelligent departure for Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre,
Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).


2

Introduction

been thought to languish abandoned.4 Spenser and Milton, to take a
different pair of poets, have also been felt to be at the established centre
of Romantic writing’s relations to its literary past.5 Not only is Jonson
unlike his contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (so we have been told), but he differs from them
further in remaining bounded by his times into the past, not part of
the ongoing process whereby later writers fashion their own voices from
and against those of their predecessors. Anne Barton’s tightly localized
account of ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and
Coleridge in 1802’ is itself exceptional in allowing that Jonson was
available to Romantic writers as a precursor from whom to learn and
depart.6 This study moves on from Barton’s article to argue that Jonson’s
impact in the Romantic age stands in need of reconsideration: I seek
to show that Jonson, far from being ignored, was widely and variously
performed, read, edited, and rewritten in the Romantic age; and that, far
from keeping Jonson to one side of our accounts of that age, we should
allow that his apparent marginalization obscures a variety of mode,
location, and response that, once recovered, refocuses our understanding
both of Jonson and of those who later engaged with him. Jonson is a
point across which dramatic, critical, editorial, and literary energies pass
in this period; those energies are often politically inflected; and Jonson
himself is refigured in their passing.

Coleridge wrote in the Biographia that ‘the Ancients’ and ‘the elder
dramatists of England and France’ did not seek merely ‘to make us
laugh’ in comedy, ‘much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents
of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place
morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of
their characters’. This, the remark that prompted Thelwall to inscribe
4
Compare John T. Shawcross, ‘Opulence and Iron Pokers: Coleridge and Donne’,
John Donne Journal, 4 (1985), 201–24; and Anthony John Harding, ‘ ‘‘Against the stream
upwards’’: Coleridge’s Recovery of John Donne’, in Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding,
eds., Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 204–20.
5
On Spenser, compare Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), and Jack Lynch, The Age of
Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122–42;
on Milton, a much wider field, compare J. A. Wittreich, jun., The Romantics on Milton:
Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970),
and Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
6
Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in
1802’, Essays in Criticism, 37 (1987), 209–33.


Introduction

3

Jonson’s exceptionality in the margins of his copy, had first been printed
(by sheer oversight) once already earlier in the Biographia, and before

that eight years previously in the pages of The Friend.7 But Coleridge’s
repeated statement and Thelwall’s awkward annotation are themselves
located in a longer pattern of responses to Jonson. In the Epilogue to
the second part of The Conquest of Granada, acted in 1671 and printed a
year later, John Dryden recalled an earlier, pre-Restoration standard of
theatrical achievement:
They who have best succeeded on the stage
Have still conformed their genius to their age.
Thus Jonson did mechanic humour show,
When men were dull, and conversation low.
When comedy was faultless, but ’twas coarse:
Cob’s tankard was a jest, and Otter’s horse.8

Cob, the waterbearer of Jonson’s Every Man In his Humour, and Tom
Otter, the wife-pecked admirer of drinking vessels from Epicœne, here
stand as exemplars of Jonson’s faultless but coarse achievements; but
as they demonstrate the conformity of Jonson’s ‘genius’ to his age, so
they also serve to confine him to it. The ‘mechanic humour’ of Cob
and Otter is a matter not only of occupation but of dramatic form;
so too do they stand emblematically for the social worlds presented in
Jonson’s comedies: the emergent and increasingly crowded London of
the revised Every Man In and Epicœne. Dryden had three years earlier
given the weighted adjective mechanic to Neander in An Essay of Dramatic
Poesy whereby to describe Jonson’s dramatic writings: ‘Humour was his
proper Sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent Mechanick
people.’9 To take the measure of Neander’s usage, think, contrastively,
of the city and its inhabitants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
the ‘crew of patches, rude mechanicals | That work for bread upon
Athenian stalls’ (iii. ii. 9–10). Unlike the Shakespearean example, which
describes and locates only a group of characters, Dryden’s mechanic slides

between describing a character’s employment within the play world and
7
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate,
2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), ii. 186 and 46; idem, The Friend, ed. Barbara
E. Rooke, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), ii. 217 (7 Dec. 1809).
8
John Dryden, ‘Epilogue to the Second Part’, ll. 1–6, from The Conquest of Granada,
in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 4 vols. (Harlow: Longman, 1995– ), i. 243.
9
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in The Works of John Dryden, ed.
H. T. Swedenberg et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956– ), xvii. 57.


4

Introduction

describing the dramatist’s construction of that play world on the stage;
the adjective oscillates between qualifying the society staged by the drama
and the construction of the characters and the drama itself. Jonson’s
‘mechanic humour’ and ‘mechanic people’ are conformably suited: a
local observation becomes, by analogy, a measure by which to disparage
Jonson’s larger achievement.10 The connection made by Thelwall in 1817
in the margins of Coleridge’s Biographia therefore reunites Dryden’s
adjective with its subject; and when, as I discuss in Chapter 5, William
Hazlitt in the following year takes up mechanical to engage with Jonson
and his editor, William Gifford, we see merely the continuation of a longer
pattern of attention. Repetitions of this kind, not merely fortuitous,
signal instead the connections between Romantic responses to Jonson
and those of the periods that preceded them. My study emphasizes, that

is, not a break or fissure between earlier and Romantic Jonsons but the
continuities between them and his re-creations in the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth century.
Moreover, such a pattern, itself not previously recognized, has also
its own ironic Jonsonian beginnings. In ‘An Expostulation with Inigo
Jones’, written in 1631 in the fall-out occasioned by the printed text of
Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, Jonson had banished his one-time
collaborator from the exalted confines of the court masque to the less
exclusive world of the public theatre: ‘Pack wt h your pedling Poetry to the
Stage, | This is ye money-gett, Mechanick Age!’11 Jones, as Jonson attacks
him, is emblematic of everything from which he dissociates himself:
not a poet but a peddler of texts as small goods, drawing them, like
Shakespeare’s Autolycus or the ‘Mountebank’ of Jonson’s own poem,
from his pack to hawk around; a participant not in the elegant economies
of the court masque but in those, less genteel, of the stage and the public
theatre. That Jonson himself would write only one further masque,
Chloridia, for the court in London, before himself returning to the public
stage with The Magnetic Lady in 1632 only emphasizes the characteristic
reverse that attends on the mechanical Jonson: that from which he sought
to keep himself separate and by which he sought to distinguish his own
writing from that of his contemporaries returns to limit and to mock his
own ambitions. Mechanic, on one reading, serves narrowly to measure
his achievement in later years.
10
A habit that Ian Donaldson has observed elsewhere: ‘Damned by Analogies; or, How
to Get Rid of Ben Jonson’, Gambit, 6 (1972), 38–46.
11
Jonson, ‘An Expostulacion wt h Inigo Iones’ (UV 34, ll. 51–2): H&S viii. 402–6.

Introduction

5

But on one reading only—and most likely not Jonson’s. In his
commonplace book, Discoveries, Jonson showed a faith that the verdicts of
posterity would rectify those contemporary judgements that undervalued
a writer’s work:
In the meane time perhaps hee is call’d barren, dull, leane, a poore Writer (or by
what contumelious word can come in their cheeks) by these men, who without
labour, judgement, knowledge, or almost sense, are received, or preferr’d before
him. He gratulates them, and their fortune. An other Age, or juster men, will
acknowledge the vertues of his studies.12

Jonson’s faith itself has classical sanction: as it offers solace to other, future poets, so does the passage in Discoveries recall and thus congratulate
two passages from Quintilian.13 An ‘other age’ and a ‘juster man’ have
here indeed found in Quintilian precisely ‘vertues’ worth repeating and
preserving; they anticipate a like-minded future return to Jonson. This
faith in posterity—his own and others’—has appeared typically Jonsonian and, less expectedly, by anticipation Romantic: Ian Donaldson and
Andrew Bennett have both recently explored Jonson’s afterlife and his impact on the afterlives of other writers.14 Accounts agree, however, on the
ironies of Jonson’s faith: too often, unlike the writer imagined in Discoveries, he found himself praised during his lifetime but increasingly less so
thereafter. By 1759, in the emblematic account offered by Edward Young
in his Conjectures on Original Composition, Jonson’s classicism obscures
not only his tragedies but his whole career; he is not covered in classical
glory, but entirely covered by it: ‘Blind to the nature of Tragedy, he pulled
down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it; we see nothing
of Johnson, nor indeed, of his admired (but also murdered) antients.’15
As understanding of Jonson, in the capacious, admiring sense envisaged in Discoveries, in fact appears to diminish as time passes, so, yet
more cruelly, does critical attention to that history of his incorporation and rejection by later writers. The Jonson Allusion-Book edited by
12

Disc., 781–7: H&S viii. 587.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ii. xii. 11, 12 and ii. v. 8–10: Loeb Classical Library,
trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
14
Ian Donaldson, ‘ ‘‘Not of an Age’’: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Verdicts of Posterity’, in his Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997), 180–97; Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28–9; and, taking a different point of comparison, Ian
Donaldson, ‘Perishing and Surviving: The Poetry of Donne and Jonson’, Essays in Criticism,
51 (2001), 68–85.
15
Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in D. H. Craig, ed., Ben Jonson: The
Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1990), 485–6.
13


6

Introduction

J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams (published in 1922) covers only the period
1597 to 1700, while Robert Gayle Noyes’s account of Ben Jonson on the
English Stage (1935) closes its coverage at 1776.16 Whatever may be its other
failings, G. E. Bentley’s Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the
Seventeenth Century Compared (1945) did not pursue the late eighteenthcentury record that Noyes had broached;17 and though Herford and the
Simpsons’ account of Jonson’s ‘Literary Record’ assays a broader span,
at its close it moves, with a rapidity that does not elsewhere characterize
their meticulous work, from Pope (1728) to Swinburne (1882) in a mere
five pages.18 More recently, although Ejner J. Jensen’s Ben Jonson’s Comedies on the Modern Stage (1985) offered a valuable if partial discussion
of Jonson’s nineteenth-century reception,19 D. H. Craig’s otherwise admirable Critical Heritage volume does not advance beyond 1798, a date

whose significance I discuss in Chapter 4 below.
But why should it matter that our existing accounts are so partial? In
The Classic, Frank Kermode described, with a fine phrase, ‘the temporal
agencies of survival’, the most important of those agencies being, he
suggested, ‘a more or less continuous chorus of voices asserting the value
of the classic’.20 Jonson has had his choristers, certainly—Byron called
him ‘a Scholar & a Classic’—and at more than one dinner party in his old
age (if James Howell’s report to Thomas Hawkins is to be believed) seemed
all too keen, in singing his own praises, to anticipate the later harmonies.21
But the chorus asserting Jonson’s value has been discontinuous: he was
not consistently, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
a Romantic classic. Rather, his situation more closely resembles that of
Donne, discussed by Kermode in Forms of Attention, as an example of

16
J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams, The Jonson Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions
to Ben Jonson from 1597–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922); Robert Gayle
Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1600–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1935).
17
G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century
Compared, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); Bentley’s methodology
and conclusions were challenged by D. L. Frost, ‘Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century’,
Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 81–9; further reviews of, and additions to, Bentley’s work
are listed by Craig, ed., Critical Heritage, 579.
18
H&S xi. 305–569.
19
Ejner J. Jensen, Ben Jonson’s Comedies on the Modern Stage (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1985), 7–25.

20
Frank Kermode, The Classic (London: Faber, 1975), 117.
21
Byron to John Murray, 4 Jan. 1821: Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand,
12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1975–82), viii. 57; H&S xi. 419–20.


Introduction

7

a writer who has been lost from and then recovered to the canon.22 It
is this doubtful space between the classic and the canonical, so usefully
delineated by Kermode, that Jonson occupies in the period I consider, and
which I seek here to explore for the first time. It is a period during which
the distance between Jonson’s own self-conception and later responses
to him play against one another. Scholars have been increasingly less
willing to attribute to Jonson the clenched singleness of purpose in life,
text, and career that earlier generations emphasized; rather, they have
sought to emphasize his regular non-uniformity, the variety, mobility,
and change within his career. If this is a contemporary Jonson, in Martin
Butler’s phrase ‘genuinely inconsistent in his habits’, the many Romantic
Jonsons—varied, contested, mobile—help us further to appreciate the
diversity within his work and the diversity within the cultures that
responded to him.23
Jonson in the Romantic age is a writer consistent in his inconsistency:
responses to him cover the full range of his writings in drama, in poetry,
in the masque, and in prose; they do so in ways that, rather than obscure
the differences within and between his texts, alert readers to them.
From Romantic margins, aspects of Jonson look different; so too, from

Jonsonian margins, do aspects of the writing of the Romantic age. With
such a changing account of Jonson and Jonson’s presence in mind, I use
the terms ‘Jonson’ and ‘Romantic’ with a sense always that they are under
taxonomic pressure: I use them as ways to produce knowledge, not with
a settled conviction that they already describe a secure, pre-existing state
of knowledge. As Jonson is reshaped by the responses of the period, so
too is our sense of a ‘Romantic’ Jonson under pressure from others that
exist alongside him: a Georgian Jonson, stressing a continuity of response
across the period, or a Regency Jonson, allying him with a particular
social and political context. Although the consideration of that difficult,
retrospective phenomenon, Romanticism, is proper to the study of a
particular set of aesthetic, cultural, and political formations, it is not
directly my aim here;24 rather, I aim to juxtapose many different Jonsons,
22
Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
70–2.
23
Martin Butler, ‘The Riddle of Jonson’s Chronology Revisited’, The Library, 7th ser., 4
(2003), 49–63; compare also David L. Gants, ‘The Printing, Proofing and Press-Correction
of Ben Jonson’s Folio Workes’, in Martin Butler, ed., Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History,
Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 39–58.
24
See Seamus Perry, ‘Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept’, in Duncan Wu,
ed., A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3–11.


8

Introduction

between the years 1776 and 1850, to study the points of fit between these
varying accounts of him and his writing, and to see how the many varied
constructions of ‘Jonson’ engage and interact. Accordingly, I employ
the adjective ‘Romantic’ pragmatically, and with a consciousness of its
provisionality, in the hope that it can serve, as organizing concepts
ought, to facilitate our discovery of the more detailed picture to which
it must always be false: if it can never itself be fixed, we can use it as
a means whereby to work towards an understanding of other, more
local, historical effects of writing.25 Many of the figures discussed in the
later chapters gain entry into accounts of the Romantic only as they are
excluded from it, either chronologically or politically: those Georgian
writers of the late eighteenth century, like F. G. Waldron, who live on
through the first decades of the nineteenth; or the circle of Tory, Regency
Jonsonians gathered around William Gifford, editor of The Quarterly
Review. My purpose in examining their relations with Jonson in the years
between 1776 and 1850 is not to claim them, for the first time, as having
been as ‘Romantic’ as (say) Coleridge all along; rather, it is to bring
their examples, and Jonson’s, up against an understanding of a historical
period, and the currents of writing, thought, and politics at work within
it, that can give us a new purchase on both the Romantic age and Jonson’s
place within it.
In the following pages I offer detailed historicized readings in Jonson’s reception, readings that are attentive not only to his texts, but
equally to his performers, readers, and editors; as I attend to their diverse roles in the continued construction of his works, so do I also
seek to explore the conditions under which they encountered him.
In this account of Jonson’s reception I employ, and seek to benefit
from, the contextual understandings of literary production developed in
the still fresh work of D. F. McKenzie26 and Jerome J. McGann.27 Both
McKenzie and McGann advocate a socialized concept of authorship
25
In this I follow Iain McCalman’s lead in his ‘Introduction’ to An Oxford Companion

to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
1–11.
26
See particularly D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William
Congreve’, in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds., The Book and the Book Trade in
Eighteenth-Century Europe (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), 81–125; idem, Bibliography and the
Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and the essays collected
in idem, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald
and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
27
See esp. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); idem, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in


Introduction

9

and textual authority, whereby the material conditions of a work’s production and reception—not only its purely bibliographical codes, but
the material, social, economic, and ideological networks within which
it comes into being—are used to illuminate its meaning within its
originary and subsequent horizons.28 Jonson, I argue, was located and
constructed within networks of attention and affiliation in the years after
1776 that our current accounts do not adequately recognize. These networks are both the product and the evidence of shared, sociable modes
of performance, reading, and printing: properly to understand Jonson’s
reception we must read not only the works in which he was received but
understand their points of fit with the contexts—institutional, political,
and intellectual—in which they were located. To do so is to take up the
invitation to reconsider from a fresh historical viewpoint both Jonson
and the concept of Romantic sociability articulated by Gillian Russell
and Clara Tuite.29

Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age is a two-part exploration. Part I of
my study explores three linked contexts for Jonson’s reception in the
Romantic age: his place in the theatre, in criticism, and as he was edited.
Part II explores allusive, imaginative responses to Jonson. In both parts
I introduce the concerns at issue by analysing in detail the same work,
Francis Godolphin Waldron’s edition and continuation of Jonson’s The
Sad Shepherd (1783), under the complementary aspects that unite my
account. The first of these discussions of Waldron and The Sad Shepherd
in Chapter 1 takes his work as a point of entry into the three linked
chapters of Part I: ‘Theatrical Jonson’, ‘Critical Jonson’, and ‘Editorial
Jonson’. As I argue in greater detail in Chapter 2, Jonson maintained a
presence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century theatre far
livelier and more various than has previously been recognized. In my
discussion of ‘Theatrical Jonson’ I offer a new account of his place on
the English stage, drawing out not only a new history of productions of
his plays but also his importance as a figure of theatrical legitimacy in
the period. The chapter takes the measure both of a perceived Romantic
antitheatricality (and its Jonsonian affinities) and, at the same time, the
Historical Method and Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and idem, The Textual
Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
28
The differences between McKenzie and McGann, downplayed here, are trenchantly
discussed by G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology’, Studies in
Bibliography, 44 (1991), 83–143.
29
Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary
Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–23 esp.


10

Introduction

real but little recognized place of Jonson on the Romantic stage. In doing
so I seek to question the relationship proposed by N. W. Bawcutt between
‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic Drama’,
a relation that sees the two in hostility to one another as he argues that a
critical engagement with the texts replaced a theatrical engagement with
them; I seek also to supplement Donald J. Rulfs’s valuable but partial
account of early modern plays on the Romantic stage.30 In Chapter 3,
‘Critical Jonson’, I chart responses to Jonson from Warton’s History and
Johnson’s Lives through until 1840. As well as (again) arguing that Jonson
was much more frequently engaged with than we have previously realized,
I seek to demonstrate that such responses are involved much more in an
ongoing debate with one another; at the same time, I seek to emphasize
the radical new departure marked in 1808 by Octavius Gilchrist in his
An Examination of the Charges Maintained by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers
and Others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity & c. Towards Shakspeare and Charles
Lamb in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the
Time of Shakspeare. Chapter 4, ‘Editorial Jonson’, concerns the making
and reception of William Gifford’s nine-volume, 1816 edition of Jonson’s
Works. I offer a detailed historicized account of how Gifford’s edition
came into being within its political and social context, drawing on his
unpublished correspondence with Gilchrist, Scott, Canning, and others:
by relating the edition’s concern with Jonsonian friendship to Gifford’s
own friendships, I seek to situate its presentation of Jonson within
a historically rich framework. Later in the chapter I discuss William
Hazlitt’s responses to Jonson and his editor through Jonson’s tragedy
Sejanus: I argue that Hazlitt, far from endorsing the claims for Jonsonian
friendship made by the edition, reads it instead politically, finding in

Gifford’s Tory associations with George Canning a model of political
corruption that he understands through Jonson’s texts.
But as the forms in which writers are received are various, so have I
quite positively sought to embrace a variety of methodological approaches
in my work. Besides, therefore, inclusive accounts of Jonson’s theatrical,
critical, and editorial reception in Part I, I therefore offer in Part II a series
of close, contextual readings in allusive and adaptive relationships with
Jonson in the Romantic age. This work, whose conceptual underpinnings
30
N. W. Bawcutt, ‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic
Drama’, in R. T. Davies and B. G. Beatty, eds., Literature of the Romantic Period, 1750–1850
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976), 96–113; Donald J. Rulfs, ‘Reception of the
Elizabethan Playwrights on the London Stage 1776–1833’, Studies in Philology, 46 (1949),
54–69.


Introduction

11

I discuss in Chapter 5, with Waldron and The Sad Shepherd again my point
of entry, seeks a historically serviceable analogy for the understanding
of allusion to Jonson in the economic concerns of the early nineteenth
century. In Chapter 6, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as my focus, I
offer this understanding as a counterpart to Christopher Ricks’s valuable
formulation of ‘The Poet as Heir’;31 in Chapter 7, I continue this enquiry
by discussing the influence of Jonson on Coleridge’s imaginative relations
with Robert Southey, and the impact of his Jonsonian criticism on
Hartley Coleridge. This methodologically varied work helps to enrich
our appreciation of Jonson’s variety in the period: Coleridge’s example

is important precisely because he thinks at some distance from those
writers discussed in Part I, thereby forcing upon us the necessity of
accommodating divergent material to our understanding.
Jonson was available to writers of the Romantic age in more ways
than we have previously been willing to grant. Yes, Wordsworth did find
in Jonson’s Prologue to the revised folio Every Man in his Humour the
resonant phrase ‘deeds, and language, such as men do use’, an important
precedent for the ‘selection of language really used by men’ described
in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802).32 But so too did William Blake’s
earliest critics look to Jonson as a point of comparison, finding an
‘accord’ between the two poets ‘not in the words nor in the subject . . .
but in the style of thought, and . . . the date of the expression’; Frederick
Tatham, in his ‘Life of Blake’, praised Blake’s early lyrics as ‘equal to Ben
Johnson’.33 And how, if Jonson is to remain marginal to our accounts of
the Romantic age, are we to account for moments such as this in Keats’s
letter to Fanny Brawne of February 1820, where difficulties with his pen
coincide delightfully with a practical engagement with Jonson?
The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it and still it is very much inclin’d to
make blind es. However these last lines are in a much better style of penmanship
thof [sic] a little disfigured by the smear of black currant jelly; which has made a
little mark on one of the Pages of Brown’s Ben Jonson, the very best book he has.

31
Christopher Ricks, ‘Dryden and Pope’, in his Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 9–42, revised from first publication as ‘Allusion: The Poet as Heir’,
in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds., Studies in the Eighteenth Century III, (Canberra:
Australian National University Press, 1976), 209–40.
32
W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds., The Prose Works of William
Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), i. 123.

33
B. H. Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), and Tatham, ‘Life of Blake’
(?1832), in G. E. Bentley, jun., ed., William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1975), 149, 214.


12

Introduction

I have lick’d it but it remains very purple—I did not know whether to say purple
or blue, so in the mixture of the thought wrote purplue[.]34

More is happening in Jonson’s Romantic margins and the Jonsonian
margins of the Romantic age than has yet been adequately accounted
for. Jonson mixes with the thought and the textuality of the Romantic
age, not always as physically or as tastily as in Keats’s example, but often
as vitally; if there is no ‘On Sitting Down to Read Catiline Once Again’
in the period, there are many less well-remembered readings that are no
less energizing. Gifford, Hazlitt, and Coleridge still seem to me, as they
have to other scholars, the key readers of Jonson within the period, with
whom we must engage.35 But the connections between their accounts are
closer and more interesting than previous discussion has allowed: only
by attending to the fine individual detail of Jonson’s reception can we
hope to comprehend the larger picture that it forms; and it is a smaller
figure, Francis Godolphin Waldron, to whom I turn first.
34
The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1958), ii. 262.
35

See, e.g., Robert C. Evans, ‘Jonson’s Critical Heritage’, in Richard Harp and Stanley
Stewart, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 188–201.