Ben Jonson's Poetaster - Oh, terrible windy words!

It’s the War of the Theatres!  Ben Jonson feuding with John Marston and Thomas Dekker!  Who cares!

Poetaster, or the Arraignment (1601) features two key scenes where Jonson, under the guise of Horace, is tormented by and then torments Marston, the bad poet of the title.  Dekker, a mere hack, gets off easy.

The play is set in Augustan Rome, and most of the characters are poets, actual poets, in both senses, meaning Ovid was a poet who actually existed and whose character in the play is the real deal:

TIBULLUS  How now, Ovid!  Law cases in verse!

OVID  In troth, I know not – they run from my pen

    Unwittingly, if they be verse.  (I.3, 15)

The play begins with Ovid reciting a poem in tribute to the Latin poets.  We are again in the theater of the boys’ company, with an educated audience that spent its teenage years reading Ovid and Horace and so on.  The actors, when not rehearsing a play, were doing the same thing.

Jonson gestures toward a melodrama about young Ovid becoming a poet rather than a lawyer, as his father demands, but then getting into trouble with the Emperor over a love affair.  That is not really a Jonson-like conceit, so no surprise that this part of Poetaster is undeveloped, earnest, and dull.

Jonson gives me two great scenes in Poetaster, both slagging Marston.  The idea is that Crispinus, the Marston-alike, wants to be a poet for the prestige but has no talent for anything but big words – “A kind of paronomosy, or agnomination, do you conceive, sir?” (III.1, 29).  Horace bumps into the nuisance Crispinus in the street and cannot shake him.  The scene is a direct stage adaptation of Horace’s Satire I.9 with some extra London detail.  I know, the setting is Rome, whatever.

The climax of the play is the arraignment of the title, where we finally get some of the poetaster’s poetry:

What, shall they lubrical and Gibbery Muse

Live as she were defunct, like punk in stews?  (V.3, 78)

Virgil himself condemns Crispinus to a purgative, which makes him spend two full pages vomiting up vocabulary words:

CRISPINUS  - puffy – inflate – turgidous – ventosity.

HORACE  Barmy froth, puffy, inflate, turgidous, and ventosity are come up.

TIBULLUS  Oh, terrible windy words!

GALLUS  The sign of a windy brain.

CRISPINUS Oh – oblatrant – obcecate – furibund – fatuate – strenuous – (84)

What, “puffy,” what’s wrong with “puffy.”  But I can imagine how this would work well on stage.  A bit earlier Virgil says “The honest satire hath the happiest soul” (81) and I believe he, and Jonson, believe it.

Text and pages are from Oxford World’s Classics, The Devil Is an Ass and Other Plays, which has plenty of background and notes.

The next play on my schedule is Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, but I am going to push it out because I am grumpy about the texts at hand.  So next – posting March 9 or so – will be Ben Jonson’s Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall.