Jonson, horace and the classical tradition

Portions of chapter 1 are developed from work first pub-lished in ‘Versions of Victory: Ben Jonson and the Pindaric ode’, The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 14 2007,

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Jonson, Hor ace a nd tHe

cl assic a l tr a dition

The influence of the roman poet Horace on Ben Jonson has often been acknowledged, but never fully explored discussing Jonson’s Horatianism in detail, this study also places Jonson’s densely inter-textual relationship with Horace’s latin text within the broader context of his complex negotiations with a range of other ‘rivals’

to the Horatian model, including Pindar, seneca, Juvenal and Martial The new reading of Jonson’s classicism that emerges is one founded not upon static imitation, but rather upon a lively dialogue between competing models – an allusive mode that extends into the seventeenth-century reception of Jonson himself as a latter-day

‘Horace’ in the course of this analysis, the book provides fresh ings of many of Jonson’s best-known poems – including ‘inviting a Friend to supper’ and ‘to Penshurst’ – as well as a new perspective

read-on many lesser-known pieces, and a range of unpublished script material

manu-v ic tor i a mou l is lecturer in latin literature at the Unimanu-versity

of cambridge she is an active translator of early modern latin, contributing to several major recent translation projects in addi-tion, she has published a range of articles on classical material in Jonson, donne and Milton, and on the reception of Virgil, Horace and Pindar

Jonson, Hor ace a nd

tHe cl assic a l

tr a dition

V ictor i a MoU l

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For my parents, with love and gratitude

2 Horatian libertas in Jonson’s epigrams and epistles 54

3 competing voices in Jonson’s verse satire: Horace and Juvenal 94

4 Poetaster: classical translation and cultural authority 135

conclusion: More remov’d mysteries: Jonson’s textual ‘occasions’ 211

Acknowledgements

i am grateful to the arts and Humanities research council and to

st John’s college, cambridge for support during my doctoral work, and

to The Queen’s college, oxford for the pleasure and privilege of a Junior research Fellowship which has allowed me to prepare this monograph for publication

i am also grateful to several presses for permission to reproduce rial that appeared in earlier forms in their books and journals a version of

mate-chapter 4 was published as ‘Ben Jonson’s Poetaster: classical translation and the location of cultural authority’, in Translation and Literature, 15

(2006), 21–50 Portions of chapter 1 are developed from work first

pub-lished in ‘Versions of Victory: Ben Jonson and the Pindaric ode’, The

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 14 (2007), 51–73 and ‘The Poet’s Voice: allusive dialogue in Ben Jonson’s Horatian Poetry’, in luke

Houghton and Maria Wyke (eds.), Perceptions of Horace: a Roman Poet and

His Readers (cambridge University Press, 2009), pp 219–38 Finally, some sections of chapter 5 are based upon observations i made in ‘translation

as commentary? The case of Ben Jonson’s Ars Poetica’, Palimpsestes, 20

(2007), 59–78

For encouragement and advice on this material and more widely, thanks are due to charles Martindale, Philip Hardie, raphael lyne and david norbrook; and above all to colin Burrow

Many friends and colleagues have been a reliable source of support, advice and welcome distraction; among these, i would like to thank in particular Myles lavan, edward Holberton, Femke Molekamp and John Hyman

Finally, i would like to name with lasting gratitude lea chambers, Jonathan Katz and denis Feeney, with whom i first read Horace

Abbreviations

H&s c H Herford, Percy simpson and evelyn simpson (eds.),

Ben Jonson, 11 vols (oxford University Press, 1925–52)

oct oxford classical text

OED Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (oxford: clarendon Press,

1989)

STC a W Pollard and G r redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of

Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland; And of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 2nd edn, 3 vols (1976–91)

Jonson’s verse is cited from H&s titles of collections are abbreviated as follows:

Introduction Imitation, allusion, translation:

reading Jonson’s Horace

to the admired Ben: Johnson to encourage

him to write after his farewel to the stage 1631

alludinge to Horace ode 26 lib: 1

Musis amicus &c

Ben, thou arte the Muses freinde,

greife, and feares, cast to the winde:

who winns th’emperour, or sweade

sole secure, you noethinge dreade

inhabitante neer Hyppo-crene,

plucke sweete roses by that streame,

put thy lawrel-crownet on

What is fame, if thou hast none?

see apollo with the nine

sings: the chorus must be thine

John Polwhele 1Benjamin Jonson, born in 1572, worked under, and latterly for, three successive monarchs before his death in 1637 a close contemporary of shakespeare, he wrote in almost every important literary genre of his age, from the satires and epigrams fashionable in the 1590s to the elaborate court masques of the early seventeenth century His influence in most

of these forms – including lyric, epigram, stage comedy and verse epistle – continued to be felt for several generations a catholic for a substan-tial portion of his adulthood, his personal life was colourful, including imprisonment, murder, high patronage and poverty He befriended (or alienated), rivalled and collaborated with many of the great men of his

1 This touching and typical example of contemporary reception of Jonson’s Horatianism is scribed from John Polwhele’s notebook, Bodleian Ms english poet f 16, 10 r i have edited it only lightly line 3 refers to the invasion of Germany by Gustav adolf of sweden in 1630, which brought swedish forces into the Thirty Years’ War and led to the first major Protestant victory of the conflict

tran-at Breitenfeld in 1631 The poem is printed in H&s, vol xi, p 346 but thtran-at transcription omits line 3 semi-diplomatic transcriptions of all unpublished manuscript material are given in the appendix.

Introduction: reading Jonson’s Horace

2

day, both in england and abroad, including shakespeare (who took a

part in his 1605 play Sejanus), John donne, inigo Jones and the classical

scholars Thomas Farnaby and daniel Heinsius But at almost every turn

of this long, varied and highly public career his chief literary model, the man whose memory he honoured and whose achievement he claimed to outdo, was not any one of his talented contemporaries, but a roman poet

of the first century bc: Quintus Horatius Flaccus; ‘thy Horace’.2

That Jonson liked to think of himself as Horace, and that this identification was considered realistic enough to be accepted by many of his followers, has often been acknowledged in passing in the scholarly literature.3 Jonson has, moreover, long been recognised as a poet of clas-sical imitation in general, for whom ‘imitation’ carries a moral as well

as aesthetic force.4 several of these critics have offered helpful and ligent readings of individual ‘Horatian’ poems, but none have developed

intel-a sustintel-ained intel-account of Jonson’s Horintel-atiintel-anism, intel-and no monogrintel-aph exists devoted to Jonson’s appropriations of Horace.5

This book aims to fill that gap, discussing all of the more cant instances of Horatian allusion, imitation or translation in Jonson’s

signifi-verse (and the satirical comedy, Poetaster, which stages Jonson as Horace

himself).6 such a survey demonstrates the extent of Jonson’s Horatianism,

2 Thomas randolph, ‘a Gratulatory to Mr Ben Johnson for his adopting of him to be his son’,

line 14 Printed in Poems with the Muses looking-glasse: and Amyntas· By Thomas Randolph Master

of Arts, and late fellow of Trinity Colledge in Cambridge (oxford: printed by leonard lichfield

printer to the Vniversity, for Francis Bowman, 1638 ), stc (2nd edn)/20694, pp 22–3 addressing

himself, Jonson refers to ‘thine owne Horace’ in the ode he composed after the hostile critical reception of The New Inn in 1629 (H&s, vol x, p 493, line 43).

3 see for instance richard s Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (new Haven

and london: Yale University Press, 1981 ) and Burrow’s remarks on Jonson’s Horatian satire (colin

Burrow, ‘roman satire in the sixteenth century’, in Kirk Freudenburg (ed.), The Cambridge

Companion to Roman Satire (cambridge University Press, 2005 ), pp 243–60).

4 Jonson’s ‘classicism’ is a critical commonplace, and by ‘classicism’ is meant, among other things, self-conscious imitation of the style and form of Greek and roman writers, including Juvenal, seneca, tacitus, Martial and cicero among the romans, and lucian, Homer and Pindar among the Greeks a great deal has been written on Jonsonian imitation in its many senses of particu-

lar importance are: Thomas M Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance

Poetry (new Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp 264–93; Peterson, Imitation and Praise; Katharine eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton University

Press, 1984 ).

5 The fullest account is found in Joanna Martindale, ‘The Best Master of Virtue and Wisdom: the

Horace of Ben Jonson and His Heirs’, in charles Martindale (ed.), Horace Made New (cambridge

University Press, 1993), pp 50–85 see also robert B Pierce, ‘Ben Jonson’s Horace and Horace’s

Ben Jonson’, Studies in Philology, 78 (1981 ), 20–31 For a particularly imaginative example of a reading of an individual Horatian poem, see Bruce Boehrer, ‘Horatian satire in Jonson’s “on the

Famous Voyage”’, Criticism, 44 (2002 ), 9–26.

6 a list of passages discussed, in both Jonson and Horace, is given in a separate index.

Introduction: reading Jonson’s Horace

but also its importance to Jonson’s literary persona: Jonson used Horace,

and his relationship to the roman poet, to model his own self-conscious

poetic ‘authority’ (a well-established topos of Jonsonian criticism), to mark

his laureate role as a poet of courtly panegyric, and to insist upon his artistic freedom despite the network of patronage and financial depend-ence within which he was compelled to operate That these functions are sometimes in conflict is testimony to the subtlety and depth that Jonson found in Horace, and to the attention with which he read the latin poet: in several respects Jonson’s response to, and appropriation of Horatian themes anticipates much more recent developments in classical criticism.7

The relationship between Jonson and Horace was widely noted – and sometimes mocked – by his seventeenth-century contemporaries.8 in time the association between them, and so between a certain kind of Horatianism and the royalism of Jonson’s stuart career, became central to the reception and perception of Jonson and Horace alike in the troubled years of the mid seventeenth century This book is focused upon Jonson’s

work, not his Nachleben, but i have at several points discussed instances

of his own reception among friends and followers (often from lished manuscript sources) This largely untapped material is important supplementary evidence, shedding light on the various associations and identifications between Horace and Jonson in the minds of his seventeenth-century readers

unpub-7 several recent studies of the Satires and Epistles, for instance, have focused upon their

nuanced exploration of the balance between freedom and dependency in Horace’s address

to his patrons, superiors, equals and subordinates Work of this kind is of great help in reading the ambiguities of Jonson’s poems of praise i am thinking in particular of Kirk

Freudenburg, The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton University Press,

1993 ); denis Feeney, ‘Vna cum scriptore Meo: Poetry, Principate and the traditions of literary History in the epistle to augustus’, in denis Feeney and tony Woodman (eds.),

Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace (cambridge University Press, 2002 ), pp

172–87; r Hunter, ‘Horace on Friendship and Free speech: Epistles i.18 and Satires i.4’,

Hermes, 113 (1985), 480–90; W r Johnson, Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in

Epistles I (ithaca and london: cornell University Press, 1993 ) ellen oliensis’ chapter on the

Ars Poetica makes no reference to Jonson’s translation of the poem but is nevertheless

per-haps the single most suggestive guide to Jonson’s fascination with the Ars (ellen oliensis,

Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (cambridge University Press, 1998 ) Jonson’s translation

is discussed in chapter 5, pp 175–93

8 Thomas dekker calls him ‘Horace the second’ in the dedication to Satiro-mastix or The

vntrussing of the humorous poet As it hath bin presented publikely, by the Right Honorable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants; and priuately, by the Children of Paules (london:

edward White, 1602 ), 4 o , stc (2nd edn)/6521, and the play makes much of this connection throughout.

Introduction: reading Jonson’s Horace

4

sta rting points: e a r ly moder n

cl a ssic a l te x tsWhen i write of Jonson’s ‘Horatianism’, i do not mean to imply that

Jonson’s english poetry regularly sounds like Horace’s latin (whatever

that might mean), or that the experience of reading Jonson always or often resembles that of reading Horace’s work even a very detailed and extended allusive interaction with another text is not the same thing as

a reproduction: Virgil alludes constantly to Homer in the Aeneid, and

an awareness of that conversation is crucial to the reader’s experience of Virgil, and of his or her pleasure in it But that is not to say that Virgil

is always very much like Homer on the contrary, the pathos and beauty

of Virgil’s text arise in part from the ways in which the reminiscences of

Homer draw our attention to the unHomeric features of the Aeneid: we

are moved by aeneas’ austere farewell to ascanius, for instance, because of what it lacks in comparison with the scene between Hector, andromache

and the baby astyanax in Iliad 6.9

some of the difficulty we find in reading Jonson’s Horace emerges from this distinction between intertextuality and resemblance: to fol-low an intertextual conversation, a reader must know well the text, or texts, that form the ground of the engagement – well enough to note divergences from the model she must also expect to make such connec-tions and comparisons, and enjoy making them even the well-educated modern reader does not necessarily find it easy to read in this way This

is partly because modern education, unlike the renaissance schoolroom, does not encourage us to know a narrow range of texts extremely well (to the point of extensive memorisation).10 But it is also because even if we

9 Perhaps the single most useful discussion of renaissance modes of imitation is to be found in

George W Pigman, ‘Versions of imitation in the renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980 ), 1–32 He suggests three primary ‘modes’ of intertextuality, which he terms ‘transformative’,

‘dissimulative’ and ‘eristic’ We can, i think, see traces of all three in Jonson’s appropriation

of Horace, but the most directly relevant is the ‘eristic’ mode, by which a ‘continual insistence

on conflict [in the imitative relationship] suggests that a text may criticize, correct, or revise its model’ (27) Jonson’s texts very often cite Horace, for instance, only to ‘cap’ the latin text – to go one better.

10 The best recent overview of early modern education and its effect upon the reading and

inter-pretation of classical texts can be found in the introduction to craig Kallendorf, The Other

Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture, classical Presences (oxford

University Press, 2007 ), pp 1–16 Kallendorf’s notes are an invaluable guide to further graphy on the topic For more detailed information on the elizabethan schoolroom in particular,

biblio-see t W Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University

of illinois Press, 1944 ).

The Jonsonian ‘edition’ 5have read closely in classical literature, the texts in which we read Virgil

or Horace do not generally encourage us to make these sorts of tion or comparison

connec-By contrast, the classical editor of the renaissance – such as Thomas Farnaby or daniel Heinsius, with both of whom Jonson corresponded – was naturally concerned to establish the latin or Greek text upon which he was working, but also to point out connections between texts: one aspect

of what we would now call ‘intertext’.11 He also, typically, makes

judge-ments about these comparisons – that is, editorial comment not only sets

up parallels or points out differences between passages but also adjudicates between them, on both moral and aesthetic grounds early modern editors are not squeamish about stating their preference, or claiming (for instance) that Horace is better than Pindar – to name one example which is, as we shall see, directly relevant to Jonson’s experiments in english lyric form.12

t he Jonsoni a n ‘edition’

it is often remarked that Jonson’s printed texts – even, or especially, the texts of the masques, that most ephemeral of genres – closely resemble contemporary editions of the latin and Greek classics, complete, in many cases, with extensive notes upon the classical parallels or sources

of his work in the case of the 1616 folio of Jonson’s Workes, this

resem-blance extends even down to the type used for its setting.13 This quirk of Jonsonian self-presentation, aptly dubbed ‘editorial authorship’ by Joseph

11 These editorial interventions are also literally ‘paratextual’, surrounding the text densely on three sides in many early modern classical editions.

12 examples of such debates, with which Jonson would certainly have been familiar, appear in

several contemporary editions or works of criticism see, for instance, Julius scaliger, Poetices

libri septem ([lyons]: apud antonium Vincentium, 1561 ), 2 o , Book 5 roger ascham describes

Pindar and Horace as ‘an equall match for all respectes’ (roger ascham, The Scholemaster, ed

John e B Mayor (london: Bell and daldy, 1863 ), Book 2, p 155) For further information on

this topic, see: stella P revard, Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-Ode: 1450–1700, Medieval

and renaissance texts and studies 221 (tempe: arizona center for Medieval and renaissance studies, 2001 ), pp 33–9.

13 on the bibliographic originality and importance of this folio, see Martin Butler, ‘Ben

Jonson’s Folio and the Politics of Patronage’, Criticism, 35 (1993 ), 377–90; d Heyward Brock,

‘Ben Jonson’s First Folio and the textuality of His Masques at court’, Ben Jonson Journal, 10

( 2003 ), 43–55; richard c newton, ‘Jonson and the (re)invention of the Book’, in claude J

summers and ted-larry Pebworth (eds.), Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of

Ben (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982 ), pp 31–55; Jennifer Brady and W H Herenden (eds.),

Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (london and toronto: associated University Presses, 1991 ); Martin Butler

(ed.), Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, Performance, History (new York: Macmillan, 1999 ); and

douglas a Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern

England (cambridge University Press, 2000 ), chapter 3 loewenstein stresses the extent to which

Introduction: reading Jonson’s Horace

6

loewenstein, has been much discussed in recent years, most richly and convincingly by loewenstein himself.14 But although loewenstein speaks

perceptively of imitatio and its place in Jonson’s poetics, he locates it –

and its significance – within the emergent rhetoric of the ‘possession’ of intellectual property.15 i want to take on board much of loewenstein’s excellent work; but this book is not primarily concerned with Jonsonian

‘possessiveness’ rather i am interested in the way in which Jonsonian

intertextuality itself, especially in the juxtaposition of competing clas sical

‘voices’, invites the reader, as surely as Jonson’s sometimes hectoring aces, prologues and dedications, to construct an authorial voice that com-pares, judges and even claims to outdo his classical sources

pref-of course Horace is not the only classical author whom Jonson read with attention His works are filled with references to, and imitations of, tacitus, Juvenal, Martial, seneca, Pindar and lucian as well as the poets

of the Greek anthology and many neo-latin authors Horace is not a major presence in all of Jonson’s works – he is of less importance, for instance, to his later comedies (which are in any case not the subject of

this book) – and the 1605 play Sejanus, which, like Poetaster, is built

sub-stantially from translation, is based not upon Horace but tacitus.16 What

is striking about Jonson’s Horatianism is that even when Jonson uses his poetry to think about and engage with other authors, he so often does so

in juxtaposition, contention or conversation with an Horatian voice.17

Jonson’s textual originality predates the folio (loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship

(cambridge University Press, 2002 ), pp 182–6).

14 Joseph loewenstein, Possessive Authorship He uses the phrase ‘editorial authorship’ in chapter 5 Genette notes the complicating effect of editorial notation upon the conventional construction

of the author by the reader (Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans Jane e

lewin (cambridge University Press, 1997 ), p 337) Jonson’s ‘authorial’ editorial interventions – including prefaces, glosses and dedications as well as extensive marginal notation – collapse that distinction between editor and author.

15 ‘Jonson had long since made the ethics of imitation his own proper problematic His unrivalled importance for the historiography of intellectual property stems from the centrality of this prob- lematic not only to his professional and intellectual career, but also, it seems, to his very sense of

self’ (loewenstein, Possessive Authorship, p 111).

16 even in Sejanus, however, Jonson defends the form of his play in the prefatory letter with a ence to his forthcoming edition of Horace’s Ars Poetica: the implication is that even if this is not

refer-an Horatirefer-an play at a textual level, it is the kind of thing a modern Horace might have written.

17 loewenstein comes close to what i mean when he writes that ‘one way of mapping Jonson’s ative development would be to follow the process by which other literary models – aristophanes, lucian, cicero, but above all, Martial – jostle Horace’, although he makes this observation in

cre-passing and does not follow up his own suggestion (loewenstein, Possessive Authorship, p 120)

The difference between the list of ‘rivals’ to Horace suggested by loewenstein here and those with which this book is concerned probably stems from the fact that his book is concerned pri- marily with Jonsonian drama, this one with Jonson’s verse; although loewenstein does in gen- eral underplay Jonson’s Horatianism.

Rivals to Horace in Jonson’s verse 7

k inds of contention: r i va l s to hor ace

in Jonson’s v er serecent work on classical (especially latin) literature, making use of – if not wholly adopting – post-structuralist theories of the wide-ranging scope of intertextuality, has expanded our sense of the ways in which one text may evoke another (or several others) Focusing in particu-lar upon the poets of augustan rome, these critics have explored the

extent to which not only the content but also the context of a source text

may be evoked by a range of allusive strategies; and, most significantly, how these activated sub-texts and sub-contexts contribute to the cre-ation of meaning in the literature – of Virgil or Horace, for instance – under consideration.18 The subtlety and potential scope of this kind of reading has not been much applied to Jonson This is the case despite the acknowledged density of classical (especially roman) material in Jonson’s work, the centrality of close textual study of roman authors

to renaissance education, and the fact that classical editions of Jonson’s own day were typically concerned to point out instances of ‘imitation’ between one ancient text and another a broad understanding of inter-textuality – including imitation, allusion and translation – is fundamen-tal to my discussion of Jonson’s Horace although the specific terms and texts of the allusive ‘dialogue’ with Horace (and, especially, the political and cultural force they bear) varies in the course of Jonson’s career, and between different poetic genres, the relationship itself is a constant feature

of his work, and the central topic of this book

Both early and late, in poems dating from the 1590s just as in late odes of the 1630s, we find Jonson’s relationship to Horace played out in the negotiations between Horatian and Pindaric lyric models and their associated modes of praise and poetic power This aspect of Jonson’s Horatianism is discussed in chapter 1 chapter 2 is concerned with Jonson’s epigrams and epistles and, more widely, the poetics of his address

to patrons and noble friends in these poems, an analogous ‘dialogue’ emerges between the ambiguous ‘freedom’ of Horatian hexameter verse

18 i am thinking in particular of: stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation

in Roman Poetry (cambridge University Press, 1998); Gian Biagio conte, The Rhetoric of

Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed and trans charles segal

(ithaca: cornell University Press, 1986 ); don Fowler, ‘on the shoulders of Giants: intertextuality

and classical studies’, Materiali e Discussioni, 39 (1997), 13–34; charles Martindale, Redeeming

the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (cambridge University Press, 1993 ) and

lowell edmunds, Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry (Baltimore and london: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2001 ).

Introduction: reading Jonson’s Horace

8

(the Satires and Epistles) and rival models of address found in Martial’s

epigrams and seneca’s philosophical letters in Jonson’s satiric poetry, explored in chapter 3, a related kind of ‘freedom’ – to criticise rather than to praise – sees both Horatian and Juvenalian models of satiric verse invoked and allowed, as it were, to ‘compete’

in Poetaster – a play very explicitly about imitation, both aesthetically

and morally – the Horatian voice contests and finally, in its pervasiveness, triumphs over ovidian, Virgilian and even Homeric models, as well as a wide range of contemporary dramatic material (including references to plays by Marlowe, Marston, dekker, chapman and shakespeare) The

bravura demonstration of imitatio in the play ranges from structural

resemblance, through extended allusion or imitation, to close translation

and even outright borrowing (or ‘plagiary’) Poetaster is the main subject

of chapter 4

m a nuscr ipt circul ationBut it is not only the details of printed presentation that invite the Jonsonian reader to enter into an assessment – an editorial ‘adjudica-tion’ – of the competing models (Horace and Pindar, or Horace and Martial, for instance) that stand behind a text Jonson’s work was circu-lated widely in manuscript, both before and after his death; and contem-porary verse manuscripts and miscellanies are filled, too, with examples

of classical imitation and translation – especially of Horace – which are

in varying ways and to varying degrees ‘Jonsonian’ The epigraph to this

introduction, Polwhele’s consolatory ode on the failure of The New Inn, is

an example of just this kind of thing Polwhele uses a version of Horace

to honour and console Jonson: by doing so, he flatters Jonson, but also implies and acknowledges the success of Jonson’s own project of self-

presentation as Horace.

Manuscript evidence of various kinds, including copies of Jonson’s own poetry as well as the translations and imitations of others, reveal a great deal about how Jonson’s ‘Horatianism’ was read by his contem poraries and immediate successors.19 in manuscript miscellanies, individual choices

in the editing, titling and ordering of poems are often suggestive in this

respect in Bodleian Ms rawlinson Poetry 31, for instance, Forest 3 (‘to

sir robert Wroth’) is titled ‘to sir robte Wroth in / prayse of a countrye

19 There has been very little work on such material in relation to Jonson’s classicism, though riddell’s notes on marginalia are a useful starting point (James a riddell, ‘seventeenth-century

identifications of Jonson’s sources in the classics’, Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (1975 ), 204–18).

Whose Horace? 9lyfe: / epode’.20 The subtitle ‘epode’ invites the reader to associate the

poem with Horace, Epodes 2; and that association is further strengthened when we compare the title of Forest 3 with the titling of Jonson’s own translation of Epodes 2, which appears a few pages earlier in the manu-

script: ‘an: ode in Horace in Prayse / of a countrye lyfe, translated:’.21 if

we read the Wroth poem as primarily a response to, or version of Epodes

2 – that is, if we prioritise the Horatianism of the poem over, say, its models in Martial – our interpretation of the piece may be significantly altered.22 details of this kind reach behind Jonson’s own powerful, almost obsessive, attempts to control his readers’ responses, and give some indi-cation of the extent to which his Horatianism was noted by his contem-porary readers, and what significance they attached to it

in addition to evidence of this kind, which points to how Jonson was read and his poetry understood by his contemporaries, manuscript mater-ial offers a wealth of information about the broader literary culture to which Jonson responded and which he in turn helped to shape surviving verse manuscripts testify, for instance, to a culture of classical transla-tion and imitation that extended to the imitation and even the translation (into latin) of Jonson himself This cultural context, in which the practice

of translation, a paradigmatic school exercise, remained a focus of literary energy and creative response in adulthood is essential background for an understanding of, for instance, Jonson’s unfashionably ‘close’ translations

of Horace (such as the Ars Poetica) as well as the many explorations of

close translation that are embedded in his works That broader culture

is not the main focus of this book, but it informs and supports my ings of Jonson’s Horatianism, and i discuss various examples of Jonson’s own reception alongside his close translations in chapter 5 (‘translating Horace, translating Jonson’)

read-W hose hor ace?

if Horace is indeed so important to Jonson, why has the relationship gone relatively unremarked? The answer is in part, i think, to do with the

‘version’ of Horace most alive to Jonson and his contemporaries For the modern well-educated reader – even the classicist who does not specialise

in Horace – the most familiar features of Horatian style, his ‘signature

20 Bodleian Ms rawlinson Poetry 31, 34 r

21 Bodleian Ms rawlinson Poetry 31, 28 r

22 The implications of this manuscript evidence for our reading of the poem in question is cussed in chapter 3, pp 122–6

dis-Introduction: reading Jonson’s Horace

10

elements’, are probably a certain notion of stoic ‘resignation’, a perception

of (sometimes discomfiting) political loyalty, and above all a beautifully expressed commitment to ‘wine, women and song’ in the face of time and death.23 other possible strong associations are his social position as a friend of Virgil, a favourite of Maecenas, and finally also of augustus; and perhaps the peculiar concentration and elusive force of his lyric style in

each of these cases, the perception of Horace is founded upon the Odes.

With a couple of exceptions – ‘drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes’

(Forest 9); or perhaps ‘My Picture left in Scotland’ (UW 9), with its rueful

pose of aging self-deprecation – these are not likely to be the first ciations we have with Jonson’s verse.24 The so-called ‘cavalier Poets’, the

asso-self-consciously imitative ‘sons of Ben’ are by these criteria much more

Horatian than Jonson himself, and criticism has to some extent reflected that perception.25 Jonson’s Horatianism, by contrast, has been underno-ticed and inadequately described partly because his version of Horace is quite different to ours: his ‘favourite’ passages – the individual poems and sections of poems to which he returns most frequently over the course of

a long career – are drawn largely from the hexameter verse, the Satires and Epistles (currently mainly the preserve of professional classicists) and the unfashionably panegyric Odes iV.26 Jonson took Horace’s moral authority – like his own – seriously

it is not just a matter of genre The themes with which ‘Jonson’s Horace’

are most prominently concerned are also unfashionable – of the Odes, for

instance, he concentrates upon Horace’s boldest and least ironic

declara-tions of the poet’s power to immortalise (Odes i.1, iii.30, iV.8 and iV.9)

amongst the hexameter verse, the favoured passages are concerned with

male friendship (the Epistles, plus a few epistolary odes), or with the tiation of freedom and power, in politics and art alike (the Satires, Epistles

nego-23 charles Martindale offers an excellent overview of the various constructions of Horace at

differ-ent periods in his introductory essay to Horace Made New (‘introduction’, in charles Martindale and david Hopkins (eds.), Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the

Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (cambridge University Press, 1993 ), pp 1–26.

24 The Song To Celia (‘drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes, / and i will pledge with mine’) is actually modelled upon sections of the Epistles of Philostratus ‘My Picture left in Scotland’ does

have many elements of the lyric Horace: an aging authorial voice, an ironic awareness of ical decline, a sense of real humour as well as convincing pain and desire it is however unusual among Jonson’s lyric.

phys-25 Joanna Martindale gives an excellent, albeit brief, account of the relationship between Jonson’s Horatianism and that of his successors (J Martindale, ‘The Best Master of Virtue and Wisdom’).

26 certainly included in this list are: Odes i.1, iii.30, iV.1, iV.8 and iV.9; Satires i.4, ii.1 and ii.7;

Epistles i.5, i.11 and i.18; portions of the Ars Poetica a list is included in the index of passages

discussed.

Implications and directions 11

and Ars Poetica).27 some passages, such as Odes iV.8, to which Jonson

returned almost obsessively, combine these themes: that poem is one of Horace’s boldest statements of the ‘monumentalising’ power of verse, and lies on the margin between lyric and verse letter.28 to read Jonson’s Horatianism well, we must reread Horace

implic ations a nd dir ectionsThis study will contribute to our understanding of Jonson’s classicism, his poetics and the nature of his authority as it was constructed both by himself and by others during and after his lifetime But the conclusions presented here are significant, too, for students of the period more gen-erally it may be true that Jonson’s patterns of thought and connection were more deeply and specifically intertextual than those of many of his contemporaries; but the sophistication of the allusive ‘conversation’ in his work is not unique other early modern authors benefit from attention of this kind, as does the study of classical reception in the period donne’s Horatianism has, for instance, been relatively little studied (perhaps because it is most evident in the less popular verse satires and epistles), but exhibits a very similar kind of intertextual sophistication to that we find in Jonson.29

amongst studies of classical reception, the possibility of ‘negative’ or equivocal appropriations of major authors has produced some of the most interesting work of recent years.30 craig Kallendorf has reminded us that

we, in our twentieth- or twenty-first-century sadness or cynicism, are not uniquely sophisticated in our sensitivity and response to the compromis-

ing sorrow and ambiguities of the Aeneid Jonson can easily seem a brash

or self-satisfied author to the modern reader, a much less satisfying persona

27 Jonson was particularly interested in explorations of the inequalities and varieties of power

between the poet and his patron (as in Odes i.1, Epistles i.17 and i.18, for instance), the poet and his noble friends (many of the Epistles and Ars Poetica), and the poet and his slave (as in

Satires ii.7).

28 Putnam describes the ‘monumentalising’ effect of Odes iV.8 in his analysis of the poem (Michael

c J Putnam, Artifices of Eternity: Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes (ithaca and london: cornell

University Press, 1986), pp 145–56) references to this poem are found in UV 1, UW 77 and

Forest 12, among others This material is discussed in chapter 1 , pp 14–24.

29 see Victoria Moul, ‘donne’s Horatian Means: Horatian Hexameter Verse in donne’s satires

and epistles’, John Donne Journal, 27 (2008 ), 21–48 Verse by Jonson and donne circulated very widely in the same manuscript collections in this period, and in some cases attribution remains hard to determine between them and other more minor members of their circle.

30 i am thinking in particular of Kallendorf, The Other Virgil We could compare the ambiguous role of Virgil in Poetaster, discussed in chapter 4

Introduction: reading Jonson’s Horace

espe-as well espe-as his own personality, takes Horace seriously in all the ways that

we, currently, find hardest to appreciate – as a laureate poet of politicised praise, as a literary critic, as a moralist and as a friend Jonson’s departures from Horace – the determination, for instance, to read and write into Horace a hope for stability that the latin so often denies – are among the most moving and emotionally sophisticated passages in Jonson’s work There is no doubt that we read Jonson better, and may appreciate him

more, if we read Horace – his Horace – with attention and respect That is

the chief aim of this book But it works the other way too i have known and loved Horace for more years than i have been reading Ben Jonson; but i read, and will continue to read Horace the better for Jonson’s help

ch a pter 1

Jonson’s odes: Horatian lyric presence

and the dialogue with Pindar

Me, in whose breast no flame hath burnedlifelong, save that by Pindar lit …

rudyard Kipling 1Katharine Maus, writing of Jonson’s relationship to Horace, remarks that for the ‘first two-thirds of his career his model is the moral satirist

Horace’, rather than the Horace of the Odes.2 she is right to stress the centrality of Horatian satire to Jonson’s project – a role to be explored

in chapters 3 and 4 – but i would like to challenge her dismissal of the lyric Horace Horatian lyric influence is in fact discernible across a very wide range of Jonson’s texts, including epistles, masques, drama, trans-lation and prefatory material Moreover, this engagement is marked by

an almost obsessive return to a handful of key odes (i.1, iii.30, iV.8 and iV.9), all of them powerful statements of the poet’s intention and abil-ity to create work which will prove immortal The fact of this consistent engagement, and its significance, has not been discussed.3

Michèle lowrie traces the ‘personal narrative’ of Horace’s career in

the course of the Odes from ‘light lyrist to serious praise poet’.4 Jonson’s early assumption of Horace’s voice at his most politically and poetically established (especially in the odes of Book iV) launches his own poetic

trajectory directly into the end of this story: from the earliest texts of his

career, Jonsonian authority is figured in Horatian vatic terms Moreover, each of the Horatian odes to which Jonson most systematically alludes

is indebted to a Pindaric model (such selectivity is noticeable because

it is not true of Horace’s lyric in general, which draws its models from a

1 rudyard Kipling, ‘a translation: Horace, Bk V, ode 3’, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition

(london: Hodder and stoughton, 1940 ), p 588.

2 Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind, p 17.

3 The best general overview of Jonson’s Horatianism remains Joanna Martindale, ‘The Best Master

of Virtue and Wisdom’.

4 Michèle lowrie, Horace’s Narrative Odes (oxford: clarendon Press, 1997 ), p 322.

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

14

wide range of Greek lyric verse, including sappho, alcaeus and anacreon,

among others.) although Jonson’s late ode for cary and Morison (UW

70) is widely acknowledged as an imitation of Pindar, there has been tle consideration of the implications of his adoption of a Pindaric mode

lit-of praise.5 The second part of this chapter accordingly considers Jonson’s appropriation of – and finally contention with – Pindaric style and tone

in the odes composed throughout the course of his writing life

even in the earliest examples (Forest 12, for instance, discussed below),

Jonson’s work deploys Horatian material to express not only poetry’s ing power, but also its ability to immortalise those whom it addresses – a rhetorical turn Horace himself conspicuously avoided in his lyric until

last-his very latest work (Odes iV.8 and iV.9) The obscure Bandusian

foun-tain is ironically committed to posterity at iii.13, and many of the erotic lyrics tacitly centre upon the contrast between the swift passing of youth and beauty and its arrest in Horace’s poetry, but even the most straight-forwardly panegyric of the political odes (iV.2, iV.4, iV.5 and iV.15, for

example) never entirely escape an edge of recusatio – the poet’s refusal to

write political epic – and nor do they promise directly to immortalise the regime of which they speak This is in contrast to Pindar, almost every one of whose victory odes promises immortality of just this kind; indeed that hope is the central point and purpose of those poems, which empha-

sise the necessity of achievement and the memory of that achievement for

true glory.6 in this sense, Jonson’s fixation upon iV.8 and iV.9 is much more Pindaric than it is Horatian

Odes iV.8 and 9 feature in Jonson’s work from the earliest years of his

literary career until late in his life early examples include line 29 of iV.8, appended as the motto at the end of Ungathered Verse 1, an early poem

in praise of Thomas Palmer’s The Sprite of Trees and Herbes (1598–9)

similarly, the dedication to camden inserted in the Huntington copy

of the quarto of Cynthia’s Revels (1600) takes its pointed epigraph

5 on the reception of Pindar at this period in general see revard, Pindar and the Renaissance

Hymn-Ode shafer gives a brief but useful overview of the Pindaric and Horatian material in Jonson’s

odes (robert shafer, The English Ode to 1660: an Essay in Literary History (new York: Gordian

Press, 1966 ), pp 97–109) a briefer version of some of the arguments of this chapter can be found

in Victoria Moul, ‘Versions of Victory: Ben Jonson and the Pindaric ode’, International Journal

of the Classical Tradition, 14 (2007 ), 51–73.

6 instances of this theme in Pindar are so numerous that an exhaustive list would be extremely

long examples can be found at: Olympians 4.12, 5.25–7, 10.91–3, Pythian 1.92–6 and 99–100,

Pythian 3.107–15, Isthmian 4.41–7, Nemean 6.26–30 as well as Nemean 7.12–16 (discussed below)

and 31–2 citations of Pindar refer to the oxford classical text edition: c M Bowra (ed.),

Pindari Carmina cum fragmentis (oxford: clarendon Press, 1935 ).

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

from iV.9: ‘non ego te meis / chartis inornatum silebo’ (‘i shall not pass you over in silence / leaving you without lustre in my works’, iV.9.30–1)

These two late Horatian odes, perhaps more than any other ual texts, are central to Jonson’s negotiation of poetic power and praise, and they demand some attention in their own right lying at the heart of Horace’s fourth (and last) lyric collection, they are traditionally treated as

individ-a pindivid-air (or, in conjunction with the seventh ode, on the inevitindivid-ability individ-and

obscurity of death, a trio) Odes iV.8, addressed to censorinus, begins by

distinguishing the poet’s art from that of the sculptor or the painter:

donarem pateras grataque commodus,

censorine, meis aera sodalibus,

donarem tripodas, praemia fortium

Graiorum, neque tu pessima munerum

quas aut Parrhasius protulit aut scopas,

hic saxo, liquidis ille coloribus

sollers nunc hominem ponere, nunc deum

sed non haec mihi vis, non tibi talium

res est aut animus deliciarum egens 10gaudes carminibus; carmina possumus

donare et pretium dicere muneri

(Odes iV.8.1–12)7

I would gladly present bowls and fine

bronzes, Censorinus, to my comrades;

I would give them tripods, the prizes for brave

Greeks – and you would carry off

not the least of those rewards, if only I were rich in the arts

which Parrhasius or Scopas advanced,

the one in stone, the other in liquid colours

skilled at presenting now a man, now a god.

But this is not in my power, and you

have no shortage of such luxuries, either mentally or materially:

poetry is your delight; I can

give poems, and tell the value of the gift.8

Horace names the Greeks ‘Parrhasius … aut scopas’ (6) as examples of a sculptor and a painter, and in the opening lines their work is associated with the description of what the poet will not give (though he claims

7 The latin text of Horace is taken from the oct edition: edward c Wickham (ed.), Q Horatii

Flacci Opera (oxford: clarendon Press, 1901 ).

8 Throughout the book, translations from latin and Greek are my own unless otherwise noted.

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

16

he would if he could) – that is, bowls, bronzes and tripods, the prizes for athletic victories Horace’s claim that this is not ‘mihi vis’ (‘not my strength’, or ‘not in my power’, 9) looks in several directions: he cannot

do so because he is not wealthy; and also because his society is not that of Pindar, and he is not writing odes for athletic victories But the connection

to – and repudiation of – Pindaric form runs deeper than that Pindar’s poems repeatedly associate themselves with the image of an object: a cup,

a wreath, a building.9 Horace reminds us of this Greek tradition, and he claims that he is not part of it But Pindar too distinguishes his art from the ‘static’ work of a sculptor: ‘i am no sculptor, to work unmoving statues

that stand resting upon their base’ (Nemean 5.1–2) Horace’s strikingly

confident self-representation, described by Putnam as ‘a speaker who is very much dominant’, both evokes and distances himself from Pindar and his style.10

The poem’s development of Pindar’s favourite theme – that songs ate glory – is accordingly stark in Pindar’s odes the achievement of the addressee, his athletic prowess, the nobility and excellence of the aris-tocratic sponsor, the prizes awarded for victory, and the fame-winning

cre-‘prize’ of the poem itself are all closely associated with one another, densely interrelated Horace’s tone, by contrast, unbinds these associ-ations in bluntly prosaic language: ‘neque / si chartae sileant quod bene feceris, / mercedem tuleris’ (‘and if historical documents make no men-tion of your fine achievements, / you’ll receive no recompense for them’, 20–2) The historical and mythological characters mentioned in the latter half of the poem, both roman and Greek, owe their immortality to the Muse and the Muse alone:

quid foret iliaeMavortisque puer, si taciturnitas

obstaret meritis invida romuli?

ereptum stygiis fluctibus aeacum

virtus et favor et lingua potentium

vatum divitibus consecrat insulis

dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori:

caelo Musa beat

9 The ode is, for example, imagined as a palace in the opening lines of Olympian 6 and a house at Pythian 6.7–9; as a drinking bowl at the beginning of Olympian 7, and a memorial col- umn at Nemean 4.81 The ode conveys fame like ‘winged wreaths’ in the final lines of Olympian

treasure-14 (22–4).

10 Putnam, Artifices of Eternity, p 147.

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

What would he have been, the child

of Ilia and Mars, if grudging silence

had hindered the fulfilment of what Romulus deserved?

The strength, the approval and the speech of powerful

poets save Aeacus, snatched from the Stygian waves,

and install him in glory on the isles of the fortunate.

The Muse forbids the death of the man who deserves praise:

the Muse by her blessing raises him to heaven.

(Odes iV.8.22–9)

in a line which teases our Pindaric expectations, Horace declares: ‘virtus

et favor et lingua potentium / vatum divitibus consecrat insulis’ (‘the strength, the approval and the speech of powerful / poets install [aecaus]

in glory on the isles of the fortunate’, 26–7) in the world of the Pindaric victory ode, the abstract nouns of line 26 are divided up amongst the participants – ‘virtus’, strength and excellence (Greek ‘arete’) is the prov-ince of the victorious athletes and princes, as well as of poets, each in their own realm; whereas ‘favor’ (‘approval’) is bestowed by the noble patrons and by the Muse The ‘lingua’ – the tongue, or speech – sug-gests poetry perhaps, but ‘potentium’ (‘of powerful [people]’) leads us to expect that we are talking here of the patrons, the powerful men whose excellent achievements and approval the poet requires in order to furnish him with commissions and subject matter alike teasingly delayed until the next line, the noun qualifying ‘potentium’ is revealed instead to be

‘vatum’ – it is the poets, after all, who claim the power The wealth of the line (‘divitibus’ means literally ‘rich’) turns out to belong not to the patrons or nobles, men who are rich as the poet, as he began the poem

by stating, is not; but rather to the ‘isles of the fortunate’, an afterlife of happiness and prosperity only attained, even by the richest of men, with the poet’s help

Jonson’s late poem ‘to the right Honourable, the lord treasurer of

England an epigram’ (UW 77), dating from between 1628 and 1632, is

based in structure and sentiment upon Horace, Odes iV.8 – censorinus is

replaced as addressee by lord Weston, the lord treasurer

if to my mind, great lord, i had a state,

i would present you now with curious plate

of Noremberg, or Turkie; hang your roomes

not with the arras, but the Persian loomes.

i would, if price, or prayer could them get, 5

send in, what or Romano, Tintoret,

Titian, or Raphael, Michael Angelo,

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

18

Have left in fame to equall, or out-goeThe old Greek-hands in picture, or in stone

(UW 77.1–9)11The relationship is telling: the Greek artists enumerated by the latin poem (Parrhasius and scopas, 6) are replaced with classics of the italian

renaissance (‘Romano, Tintoret, / Titian, or Raphael, Michael Angelo’,

6–7) who are said to ‘equall, or out-goe / The old Greek-hands in picture,

or in stone’ (8–9) The Greek artists who have been surpassed by their renaissance successors are now unnamed – and so unknown – just as surely as the heroes or nobles who lack a poet to immortalise them.Jonson’s poem uses Horace’s in another way, too The core compliment

to lord Weston is that he, unlike mere artists or sculptors, can perform the

actions that earn a statue – provide, as it were, the subject for memorial:

This i would doe [present Weston with paintings or sculptures],

could i thinke Weston one

catch’d with these arts, wherein the Judge is wise

as farre as sense, and onely by the eyes

But you i know, my lord; and know you can

discerne betweene a statue, and a Man; 15can doe the things that statues doe deserve,

and act the businesse, which they paint, or carve

What you have studied are the arts of life;

(10–17)

This is a graceful tribute, and the transformation of the latin ‘artium’ (5) into the (better) ‘arts of life’ (17) is particularly fine But Horace’s poem is also about the inadequacy of painting and sculpture – for all their finery, neither of these arts immortalises as surely as poetry:

non incisa notis marmora publicis,

per quae spiritus et vita redit bonis

post mortem ducibus, non celeres fugae

reiectaeque retrorsum Hannibalis minae,

non incendia carthaginis impiae

eius, qui domita nomen ab africa

lucratus rediit, clarius indicant

laudes quam calabrae Pierides

(Odes iV.8.13–20) Neither marbles carved with well-known public deeds,

through which breath and life return to fine

11 Jonson’s verse is cited from Herford and simpson i have, however, modernised i/j and u/v, and expanded manuscript contractions where H&s print them in original form.

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

leaders after death, nor the rushed escape

of Hannibal, or his threats now converted into retreat,

nor the blazing of wicked Carthage –

none of these make known the name of the man

who returned with profit from conquered Africa

more clearly than the praises of the Calabrian Muses.12

This thought is rooted in Pindar, and Jonson signals his recognition of that with his compliment to Weston: ‘But you i know, my lord; and know you can / discerne betweene a statue, and a Man’ (13–14) Pindar’s

Nemean 5 begins with the distinction between the maker of statues (which

are fixed and immovable) and the mobile, living power of the poet’s song: ‘i am not a sculptor, to work unmoving statues that stay standing upon their base But on every ship and in every boat, sweet song, go forth

from aigina spreading your news …’ (Nemean 5.1–3).

Jonson flatters Weston by telling him that he is better and worth more than a great sculptor, or a great work of art But the gap between

Jonson’s compliment and Horace’s ode – which tells us that it is poets

who are better than artists and sculptors – sets up the close of the poem

typically, Jonson has displaced Horace’s statement about his own

pow-ers from the body of the poem (lines 9–12, quoted above) to its close, ensuring that the poem ends not, elliptically, with liber (Bacchus, the god of wine and freedom, as in iV.8), or with the virtue of the addressee (as in iV.9), but rather with Jonson himself, and a glance at Horace,

Odes iii.30:

though i cannot as an architect

in glorious Piles, or Pyramids erectUnto your honour: i can tune in song

aloud; and (happ’ly) it may last as long

(25–8) 13Jonson’s ode for lord Weston appears to be uncharacteristically mod-est: in fact, the poem relies upon its relationship with Horace – and the educated reader’s appreciation of it – to communicate its message The fame even of the Greeks is contingent upon their immortalisation

12 The man in question is scipio africanus, whom Horace need not name because he has been so thoroughly immortalised by ennius in fact, Horace adds to ennius’ power by collapsing scipio africanus with scipio aemilianus, who razed carthage in 146 bc, two decades after ennius’

death (see Putnam, Artifices of Eternity, p 150.)

13 in Odes iii.30 Horace claims to have built a monument more lasting than bronze, and loftier

than the pyramids.

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

unusual ‘lesser asclepiad’ are Odes i.1 and iii.30, ‘bookend’ proclamations

of poetic power and assurance for the unitary first three books

Written for new Year’s day 1600, the rutland epistle is a useful ing point for considering this particular intertextual conversation in more depth The central movement of this long poem in praise of elizabeth (written probably in the hope of eliciting patronage) is a dense tapestry of borrowings from Horace:

start-Beautie, i know, is good, and bloud is more;

riches thought most: But, Madame, thinke what store

The world hath seene, which all these had in trust,

and now lye lost in their forgotten dust 40

it is the Muse, alone, can raise to heaven,

and, at her strong armes end, hold up, and even,

The soules, shee loves Those other glorious notes,

inscrib’d in touch or marble, or the cotes

Painted, or carv’d upon great-mens tombs, 45

or in their windowes; do but prove the wombs,

That bred them, graves: when they were borne, they di’d,

That had no Muse to make their fame abide.

14 a similar engagement with this cluster of Odes is found in UW 27 (‘an ode’), which borrows from Odes iV.9 the structural motif of a catalogue of poets and those they have sung in the final

lines of the poem Jonson claims that just as successive generations of poets have promoted their

beloved to immortality, so shall he another late poem is very blunt: ‘For in the Genius of a Poëts Verse, / The Kings fame lives Go now, denie his Teirce’ (UW 68.13–14) The warrant for one tierce of wine yearly is dated 26 March 1630; UW 68 presumably postdates this.

15 r G M nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book I (oxford:

clarendon Press, 1970 ), pp xxxvii–xxxviii.

or, in an armies head, that, lockt in brasse,

Gave killing strokes There were brave men, before

aJax, or idomen, or all the store,

That Homer brought to Troy; yet none so live: 55 Because they lack’d the sacred pen, could give

like life unto ’hem Who heav’d Hercules

Unto the starres? or the Tyndarides?

Who placed Jasons argo in the skie?

or set bright ariadnes crowne so high? 60Who made a lampe of Berenices hayre?

or lifted cassiopea in her chayre?

But only Poets, rapt with rage divine?

and such, or my hopes faile, shall make you shine

(37–64)

The poem’s cast of characters is largely derived from the two central odes

of Horace’s fourth book: Helen, the ‘Argive Queene’ (49), ‘idomen’ (54) and

‘Homer’ (55) all appear in iV.9 (lines 16, 20 and 6 respectively); ‘Hercules’

(57) is in heaven in both Odes iV.8 (line 30) and Forest 12; and the ‘Tyndarides’

(58) appear at iV.8.31 The central thought of Jonson’s epistle (‘achilles was

not first, that valiant was’, 51) redrafts the latin of Odes iV.9:

primusve teucer tela cydonio

direxit arcu; non semel ilios

vexata; non pugnavit ingens

idomeneus sthenelusve solus 20dicenda Musis proelia; non ferox

Hector vel acer deiphobus gravis

excepit ictus pro pudicis

coniugibus puerisque primus

multi; sed omnes illacrimabiles

urgentur ignotique longa

nocte, carent quia vate sacro

(Odes iV.9.17–28) Nor was Teucer the first to aim

arrows from a Cretan bow; Troy was not troubled

just the once; mighty Idomeneus

or Sthenelus were not the only ones to fight

battles worth poetic retelling; ferocious

Hector or swift Deiphobus did not

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

22

bear heavy blows for the sake of their chaste

wives and their children before anyone else.

Before Agamemnon there lived

many brave men; but all are weighed down

unwept and unknown by long

night, because they lack a sacred bard.

Finally, lines 41–3 (‘it is the Muse, alone, can raise to heaven … The soules,

shee loves’) translate iV.8.28 (‘caelo Musa beat’)

The comparison of poetry to sculpture and painting in lar (45–6) is similarly indebted to Horace The phrase ‘because they lack’d the sacred pen’ (56) suggests ‘carent quia vate sacro’ (‘because they lack a sacred bard’, iV.9.28), and both of these elements reach

particu-behind Horace to Horace’s model in Pindar, Nemean 7: ‘καὶ μεγάλαι γὰρ ἀλκαὶ / σκότον πολὺν ὕμνων ἔχοντι δεόμεναι’ (‘For great deeds of courage / remain in deep darkness when they lack songs’, 13–14) like

Jonson’s poem (‘That Homer brought to Troy’, 55), Pindar’s ode goes on

to mention Homer, and Jonson’s poem, again like Pindar, suggests that the greatness of the hero in question has not only been remembered but actually enhanced by the poet: ‘i believe that odysseus’ story / has become greater than his actual suffering because of Homer’s sweet

verse’ (Nemean 7.20–1).16

apparently wilful obscurities in Jonson’s diction are illuminated by the latin text The phrase ‘[t]hose other glorious notes, / inscrib’d in touch or marble’ (43–4) is unclear without reference to the latin: ‘non incisa notis marmora publicis’ (‘not marbles carved with public records’, iV.8.13) Knowledge of the latin line clarifies the sense of ‘notes’ to include ‘renowned’ or ‘well-known’ as well as ‘marks’ The whole thing is

in fact a dense kind of pun: Horace’s phrase ‘notis … publicis’ does not tell us who or what those ‘well-known public deeds (or men)’ actually are

For all their ‘publicness’ they are rendered precisely unknown by Horace’s

failure to name them (unlike lollius and censorinus, the dedicatees of iV.8 and 9) These ‘well-known’ deeds are conspicuously obscure, not only because they go unsung, but also because the meaning of the word ‘notes’

is unclear without its own poetic history

But these lines are not the limit of the intertextual ‘conversation’ Jonson’s vision of poetic success is also derived from Horace:

16 compare Forest 12.57–63 see also Pindar Isthmian 4.37–43, which connects ajax and ‘all the sons

of the Hellenes who went to troy’ (40) with Homer who has made them honoured and

remem-bered (41–3) ajax also appears in Horace, Odes iV.9 and Forest 12.54.

Forest 12 and Horace, odes IV.8 and IV.9

to curious light, the notes, i then shall sing,

Will prove old orpheus act no tale to be:

For i shall move stocks, stones, no lesse than he

Then all, that have but done my Muse least grace,

shall thronging come, and boast the happy place 80

They hold in my strange poems, which, as yet,

Had not their forme touch’d by an english wit

There like a rich, and golden pyramede,

Borne up by statues, shall i reare your head,

above your under-carved ornaments, 85 and show, how, to the life, my soule presents

Your forme imprest there

The originality of the author’s ‘strange poems’ (81–2) echoes Odes

iV.9: ‘non ante vulgatas per artis / verba loquor socianda chordis’ (‘By arts never before revealed / i speak words to accompany the lyre’, iV.9.3–4)

This claim to literary innovation is reminiscent, too, of Horace, Odes iii.30.13–14, an echo confirmed by the ‘rich, and golden pyramede’ (83, compare ‘pyramidum altius’, Odes iii.30.2) as noted above, the only other of Horace’s poems to share the metrical scheme of iV.8 are Odes

iii.30 and i.1 accordingly, these lines promise to elizabeth to ‘reare your head’ (84); whereas Horace’s opening lyric claims ‘i shall strike the stars with my uplifted head’ (i.1.36), Jonson typically goes one better and offers

to knock Elizabeth’s head, rather than his own, upon the stars among

which he has the power to number her

The virtuous lollius of Odes iV.9 is praised because he has ‘rejected the

gifts (presumably bribes) of guilty men with a high-minded expression’ (‘reiecit alto dona nocentium / vultu’, iV.9.42–3) By contrast, the ‘noble ignorants’ of Jonson’s poem are rejecting poetry – unlike, so the poet hopes and suggests, the wise and virtuous elizabeth, the lollius of her age:

But let this drosse carry what price it will

With noble ignorants, and let them still,

turne, upon scorned verse, their quarter-face:

With you, i know, my offring will find grace

(27–30)

But at least part of the force of the english poem is to establish that those things – bribes and poems – are not so different after all Jonson claims that his poetry can not only replace, but actually better, a gift of gold; but the offer

is still inherently financial: a pleased patron will pay the poet For all this enjoyment of the self-aggrandising possibilities of Horatian lyric, the poem

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

24

is alive to the mercenary subtext of the relationship described: although the poet may have real power to immortalise, we are reminded that this immortalisation is also something that the patron can buy

This subtext is centred in Forest 12 upon the resonant term ‘grace’:

‘with you, i know, my offring will find grace’ (30) The suggestion that elizabeth, unlike the ‘noble ignorants’, appreciates the value of poetry

and will recompense it in kind reflects an undertone of Odes iV.8: ‘gaudes

carminibus; carmina possumus / donare et pretium dicere muneri’ (‘We can grant songs / and name the value of such a gift,’ 11–12) Most transla-tions avoid anything so stark (Quinn considers the line ‘hardly serious’), but it is perfectly possible to translate these lines: ‘You enjoy poetry: i can give poems – and tell you how much they cost.’17 Horace’s poem goes on

to modify the position: poems are valuable because they (unlike other art) can confer immortality, but the immediate sense of that line – ‘honestly,

a “Horace” is worth something too’ – lingers in the memory The ently ‘mercenary’ remarks scattered throughout Pindar’s odes are also a much-commented-upon feature of his style, although as Kurke notes they always, like Jonson’s remark here, make it clear that the patron as well as the poet profit from the exchange.18

appar-Thus Forest 12 demonstrates several key aspects of Jonson’s engagement

with Horace, and in particular with Horace at his most vatic and Pindaric But there is in addition a playfulness to this self-conscious compression

of so many Horatian topoi in the course of one poem The climax of the

epistle even includes a promise that Jonson will effect all this isation ‘not with tickling rimes, / or common places, filch’d’ (87–8).19 This despite the fact that his poem does of course rhyme, and moreover that his Horatian hit-parade, if not quite describable as ‘commonplaces’, include some of the most audacious and most famous portions of Horatian lyric

immortal-t he poeimmortal-t a nd immortal-t he v icimmortal-tor: hor ace a nd pinda r in

f o r e s t 10 a nd t he ode to sir W illi a m sidney

(f o r e s t 14)

The tenth poem of the Forest, to which i would now like to turn, is another

early example of allusive ‘competition’ between Horace and Pindar, held

17 Kenneth Quinn (ed.), Horace: the Odes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980 ), p 314.

18 leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (ithaca and

london: cornell University Press, 1991 ), pp 228–39.

19 This term ‘filch’ recurs in Poetaster, V.3.224–5 in the phrase ‘filching by translation’ Poetaster,

performed in 1601, is exactly contemporaneous with the rutland ode.

Horace and Pindar in Forest 10 and 14

within Jonson’s own verse The poem, and that which follows it, was

originally composed for robert chester’s Loves martyr (1601), a rather

mysterious publication which also includes shakespeare’s strange ‘The Phoenix and the turtle’.20 in the Forest, however, where it was reprinted,

the poem introduces a sequence of pieces – an epode, two epistles, and

an ode – the combination of which is specifically Horatian all the more

so, when we note that Forest 10 is itself a version of one of the odes, the

ambiguous twelfth ode of Horace’s first book, which begins: ‘What man

or hero, will you take up, / clio, to celebrate on the lyre or clear flute? / which god? whose name will the playful / echo resound?’ (1–4) a con-temporary marginal note in the 1616 folio makes the same connection: ‘in imitat: ode 12 lib: 1 Horat: / incipient: Quem virum aut etc.–’.21

as so often in the portions of Horace that Jonson chooses to tate, these lines are themselves a reminiscence of Pindar, in this case the

imi-familiar opening of Olympian 2: ‘τίνα θεόν, τίν’ ἥρωα, τίνα δ’ ἄνδρα κελαδήσομεν;’ (‘What god, what hero, what man shall we sing?’, 2).22Horace has wittily reversed the order of Pindar’s elements, beginning with ‘man’, and adding the ‘quem deum?’ (‘or perhaps a god?’, 3) almost

as an afterthought.23 Jonson’s poem has in turn collapsed these three options to ‘what subject?’, focusing instead upon the ‘nomen’, the ‘great name’ of the poet’s chosen dedicatees – although the line typically man-ages to suggest that their very immortality, their ‘heaven’ is a function of their place in art:

and must i sing? what subject shall i chuse?

or whose great name in Poets heaven use?

For the more countenance to my active Muse?

(1–3)

20 H&s also print the Proludium, a poem identified convincingly as an earlier draft of Forest 10,

sent to sir John salisbury of lleweni and preserved in manuscript it does not bear the same

rela-tionship to Odes i.12 as the later version, although it does incorporate several Horatian features.

21 riddell, ‘seventeenth-century identifications of Jonson’s sources in the classics’, 217.

22 The version printed in chester’s Loves martyr has ‘we’ for ‘i’ in both cases in the first line, perhaps

an echo of the Greek.

23 The whole of Odes i.12 is arguably indebted to Olympian 2 (see eduard Fraenkel, Horace

(oxford: clarendon Press, 1957), pp 291–7) The link between Odes i.12 and Olympians 2 is

pointed out by the earliest of the editions of Horace which Jonson is known to have owned

(and the only one which predates his earliest major odes) The edition in question is Bernadini

Parthenii Spilimbergii in Q Horatii Flacci Carmina atq Epodos Commentarii Quibus Poetae ficium, & uia ad imitationem, atq ad Poetice scribendum aperitur (Venice: apud dominicum

arti-nicolinum, 1584 ), 4 o , p 140 r (Mm2 r) (hereafter Spilimbergii) The relevant comment on Odes i.12

is found at 29 r (H1 r )-29 v (H1 v ) Jonson’s copy is held in cambridge University library (X.9.15)

in suggesting connections between contemporary readings of classical texts and Jonson’s priations of them, i have where possible referred to editions Jonson is known to have owned

appro-Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

26

But Jonson’s version works a reversal upon Horace just as Horace had upon Pindar The latin poem offers seven possible divine subjects: Jove (14–16), Pallas athene (20), Bacchus (22), artemis (22), apollo (24),

Hercules (25) and the heavenly twins (25) Forest 10 takes four of these

(Hercules, Phoebus, Bacchus and Pallas), names them, slyly, in reverse order, and then rejects – rather than includes – them one by one:

Hercules? alas his bones are yet sore,

With his old earthly labours t<o>’exact more, 5

of his dull god-head, were sinne ile implore

Phoebus no? tend thy cart still envious day

shall not give out, that i have made thee stay,

and foundred thy hot teame, to tune my lay

now will i beg of thee, Lord of the vine, 10

to raise my spirits with thy conjuring wine,

in the greene circle of thy ivy twine

Pallas, nor thee i call on, mankinde maid,

That, at thy birth, mad’st the poore smith affraid,

Who, with his axe, thy fathers mid-wife plaid 15

(4–15)

This is imitation of Horace, undoubtedly; it is also imitation of Horace’s own challenging imitation; and finally it is a kind of deflation We might expect this lively renunciation of the pagan gods of ‘poets’ heaven’ to be

followed by a pious shift to Christian devotion, somehow annexed to the

royal court, in place of the political pieties of the latter part of Horace’s poem But that is not the move Jonson makes

instead, he continues to reject further pagan divinities – Mars, Venus, cupid and Hermes – and ends, rather abruptly, with the declaration that

none of these gods could be enough to persuade him to take ‘My Muse up

by commission: no, i bring / My owne true fire now my thought takes wing, / and now an Epode to deepe eares i sing’ (28–30, the italics are

present in the folio text) This unexpected conclusion pointedly jettisons the whole second half of Horace’s poem – piously devoted to mention-ing virtuous roman heroes, and finally caesar himself – in favour of the

poet’s own moral ideals as expounded in Forest 11 (the ‘Epode’ to which

Forest 10 refers).24 More specifically, it subverts the formal model that

For details of Jonson’s library, see: david McPherson, ‘Ben Jonson’s library and Marginalia: an

annotated catalogue’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), 1–106 and robert c evans, Habits of

Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading (lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995 ).

24 although Horace’s invocation of the roman heroes is not without irony, either: his choice of a

‘subject’ is disingenuous, since he repeatedly dodges just this kind of dutiful mythmaking.

Horace and Pindar in Forest 10 and 14

the opening of the poem invokes: namely, that of a victory ode For all

the differences between them, the movement of Horace’s poem shares much in common with Pindar’s: both will climax with the celebration

of a named victor (Theron of acragas, in Olympian 2, and augustus, the

‘caesar’ of Odes i.12), and both hymn that victor in terms of the mounting

glory of his family line

it is not just that Jonson’s poem jettisons this development, or that

it implicitly replaces the expected victor with Jonson himself (‘my

owne true fire’, 29; ‘and now an Epode to deepe eares i sing’, 30) it

does both of these in language which at once appropriates and rejects the combined Horatian and Pindaric inheritance (in ancient literature,

‘epodes’ are found in Greek tragic choruses, Pindar’s choral odes, and in Horace’s early part-lyrical, part-satirical collection) The phrase ‘now my thought takes wing’ (29) is derived from Pindar; but the final stanza of Jonson’s poem explicitly refuses to endorse a poetic subject determined

by another’s request or payment: no ‘beautie’, however great or divine,

‘should take / My Muse up by commission’.25 Both Horace and Pindar, the

poem implies, wrote of caesar and of Theron because they were paid to

do so if Forest 10 is still in any sense a victory ode, this victory belongs

solely to the poet

The sequence of explicitly ‘Horatian’ poems in the Forest is concluded

by the penultimate poem of the collection, the ‘Ode to sir William sydney, on his Birth-day’ (Forest 14) The ode has attracted little com-

ment, either structurally or in terms of its content in his perceptive article anthony Miller argues that the ode is indebted both to Pindaric epinicia and the roman ‘genethliacon’, or birthday poem, although he

admits that the austerity of the ethical admonition in Forest 14 is rather

different from anything found in the roman genre.26

Horace’s odes for a birthday or other occasion (such as iii.17 or iii.19, as well as iV.11, to which Miller compares this ode), even when they include broadly ‘serious’ material on aging, or the importance of good birth (e.g iii.17.1–9), typically end by modulating in an ironic and understated fash-

ion away from such themes Odes iV.11, for instance, which opens with the busy preparations for a celebration in a manner reminiscent of Forest

14, concludes not with solemn advice, but with the distracting pleasures

25 For a ‘winged’ song or technique in Pindar, see: Isthmian 5.63 (last line); Nemean 7.22; Pythians 8.34 and 5.114 (note also Horace, Odes ii.20, discussed below) Pindar several times mentions

payment for his work.

26 anthony Miller, ‘“These forc’d ioyes”: imitation, celebration, and exhortation in Ben Jonson’s

ode to sir William sidney’, Studies in Philology, 86 (1989 ), 42–68.

Horace and Pindar in Jonson’s odes

are justly summ’d, that make you man;

Your vow

Must now

t<o>’out-strip your peeres:

since he doth lacke

of going backe

little, whose will

doth urge him to runne wrong, or to stand still 30

(Forest 14.21–30)

rather, the poem is in this as in several other formal features, Pindaric

in the 1616 folio edition of Jonson’s Workes, the combination of varied

line-length and undifferentiated stanzas, as Miller remarks, ‘resembles the shape of Pindar’s odes in renaissance editions’.27 He cites as Pindaric the use of gnomic wisdom, the comparison of virtue to an athletic contest (‘[t]’out-strip your peeres’; ‘to runne wrong, or to stand still’, 26 and 30), the ‘bold’ introduction of the poet’s own voice, and the connection of an addressee’s virtue and excellence to the virtuous example of his ancestors Miller also comments upon the surprising combination of these Pindaric features not, apparently, with celebration of achieved virtue, but rather

with incitement to virtue The ‘victor’ of this victory ode hardly emerges

as victorious at all

William sidney was knighted in 1611 and died in 1612; this poem sumably commemorates the intervening birthday lisle c John first con-nected William’s apparent underachievement with the serious tone of this poem, describing it as a ‘courteous but serious admonition to him to make himself worthy of his name’.28 Much of the tension and originality of the piece derives from this juxtaposition of factors: a victory ode which seems

pre-to urge triumphant virtue rather than (not in addition pre-to) celebrating a recent achievement The poet’s role in prompting and then immortalising

27 Miller, ‘These forc’d ioyes’, 47, n 10.

28 lisle c John, ‘Ben Jonson’s “to sir William sidney, on his Birthday”’, Modern Languages

Review, 52 (1957 ), 168–76 (168).