Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall - Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

After triumphantly beating up John Marston, Ben Jonson indulged in some Shakespeare envy and wrote a history play, or perhaps a tragedy, Sejanus His Fall (1603), about the soldier who rose to rule the Roman empire, for a few years, under dissolute Emperor Tiberius, before overreaching and being crushed by the next sociopath in line.

I found Sejanus a little dull when I last read it, long ago, and I still do.  Jonson’s blank verse is expert, supple, without, likely against, Marlowe’s bombast, but also then lacking Marlowe’s (or Shakespeare’s, or satirical Jonson’s) surprise.  Jonson’s metaphysics is too rationalist, too political, to create the kind of craziness that makes for great drama.

Perhaps Jonson is too constrained by history.  The action of the fall of Sejanus, in the long last scene, is the reading in the Senate of an ironic letter from Tiberius, first praising and then condemning Sejanus.  This is what historians say happened, so what can you do, but instead of the appearance of weird, perverse Tiberius, we get proper, public letter.  In general, as in a history play but not a tragedy, characters appear and disappear according to what happened, rather than dramatic effect.

Sejanus is a solid Machiavellian villain, but the rational kind, methodically removing his enemies by poison and slander until he achieves everything except the title of Emperor:

Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

Must we rest there?  It irks, t’have come so far,

To be so near a stay.  (V.1, 88)

My favorite part of the play is when Sejanus is executed and then torn to pieces, offstage, by the mob.  Jonson’s language takes a new grotesque turn:

These mounting at his head, these at his face,

These digging out his eyes, those with his brain,

Sprinkling themselves, their houses, and their friends… (V.6, 118)

Sejanus is practically atomized:

Now torn, and scattered, as he needs no grave,

Each little dust covers a part:

So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried!  (118-9)

A genuinely weird image.  Perhaps it helps that Jonson be satirical in this last act.  The mob is savage, the Senators a pack of corrupt flatterers, the victor over Sejanus no better, and he’ll get his violent end a few years later.  And the ruler after that is Caligula!

It does not help Jonson that Robert Graves wrote a more comical and ironic account of this history in I, Claudius (1934).

Jonson likes animal metaphors.  I enjoyed this one, at the beginning of the play, when Sejanus’s enemies lament that they are not good flatterers:

We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues,

No soft, and glutinous bodies, that can stick,

Like snails, on painted walls… (I.1, 11)

Lots of anti-flatterer satire.  This line was an earthy surprise:

                    … ready to praise

His lordship, if he spit, or but piss fair,

Have an indifferent stool, or break wind well,

Nothing can ‘scape their catch.  (I.1, 12)

The more of that side of Jonson, the better.

The Oxford Jonson, where I read Poetaster, has Sejanus as well, but I switched to the 1966 New Mermaid for the text and page numbers because I preferred footnotes to endnotes.

In two weeks, Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, a revenge tragedy about which I know close to nothing.

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.

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men - Every Man in His Humour

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background.  He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe.  More importantly, he was a born Londoner.  His best plays are full of London. 

Like Every Man in His Humour (1598), not his first play (he did a lot of co-writing) but the earliest he put in the 1616 folio of his collected works, so the earliest play he claimed as his own.  It is just a comedy of types, characters with different monomanias knocking into each other.  It is meant to be current, although the types have never left us.

I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess

By laughing at them, they deserve no less:

Which when you heartily do, there’s hope left, then,

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men.  (Prologue, 8)

The “monsters” bit is a jab at the old-fashioned plays of five years ago, Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy and plays that

                                       With three rusty swords,

And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,

Fight over York, and Lancaster’s long jars;  (7)

That old stuff.  The poetry of The Spanish Tragedy, barely a decade old at this point, is used throughout Jonson’s play as not exactly an example of bad taste, since it is obviously great for its time, but rather a refusal to keep up.

Anyway, Every Man in His Humour is about men.  It is a hodgepodge of bits of Plautus and Terence but updated to the current moment.  I mean, there is a braggart soldier, and a jealous husband, stock characters going back to Menander, to the origins of theatrical comedy.  But there are also tobacco fanatics (Ralegh sparked a tobacco craze in 1586, again about a decade earlier):

BOBADILL: I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen before, of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only.  (III.2, 72)

A long list follows of the ailments cured by tobacco.  But Jonson also gives us the anti-tobacconist:

COB:  It’s good for nothing, but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke, and embers: there were four died out of one house, last week, with taking of it, and two more the bell went for, yesternight; one of them, they say, will ne’er scape it: he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward, and downward.  (III.2, 73)

It’s bad poetry that really takes a beating, “idle poetry, / That fruitless and unprofitable art  (I.1, 9), noting that this line is from the utilitarian Kno’well, and even he is more tolerant than his friend Downright who flees when a poetry recital begins:

DOWNRIGHT: Oh, here’s no foppery!  Death, I can endure the stocks better.  [Exits]

KNO’WELL Jr.: What ails thy brother?  Can he not hold his water, at reading of a ballad?

WELLBRED: Oh, no: a rhyme to him, is worse than cheese, or a bagpipe.  (IV.1, 83)

Worse than cheese!  That’s pretty bad.  The poem turns out to be good, because it is just a plagiarized chunk of Hero and Leander.  The bad poets are not just bad, but thieves, and the play ends with the offending poems thrown in the fire.  Every Man in His Humour does not have much of a plot.

The play is a preview of Jonson’s great comedies from a decade later – Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair – lively and London-packed but structured more originally.  In a sense, the text I have been quoting is actually part of this run of plays.  In the 1598 version the characters mostly have Italian names and the setting is Italian, sort of, although a weirdly Londonate Italy.  The Italian version was a big hit, but at some point before 1616 Jonson completely rewrote it, making the setting and characters English, tightening the slacker scenes, sharpening the satire.  I find the later version superior in every way, so that is what I have been quoting.

Text and page numbers are from the 1966 New Mermaids edition.  The editor is obsessed with the idea that the jealous husband is an especially subtle portrayal, beyond his comic type, returning to the idea in note after note, as if he, the editor, has his own humour.  I will also not that if the use of commas in some of the quotations above seems odd, they belong to Jonson, who was unusually attentive to the punctuation in his 1616 folio.  What they are supposed to mean to the actor is up for interpretation.

Assuming I get my writing back on track the next play will be another minor play-as-such but great London play, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

A note on Elizabethan authorship and Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I have not read

Stephen Grennblatt’s biography of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, was just published.  I did not know this book, which has been prominently reviewed, was coming.  I perhaps should have hooked my Christopher Marlowe reading to it.  For what purpose I do not know.

There is no possible way that I will buy Greenblatt’s book, but I might read it if my library buys a copy, which I suppose they will at some point.  Marlowe’s life could hardly be more interesting.  My grumpiness is more with the current practice of biography, which glosses over the use of evidence in ways with which I have difficulty.

For example.  A piece about Greenblatt’s book in Harvard Magazine, “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival” (8/8/2025), written by Nina Pasquini, begins with a grotesque error:

He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder.

Marlowe did not invent blank verse.  How could the author get this idea.  Because Greenblatt said it:

But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says.

Stephen Greenblatt knows more about Gorboduc and Henry Howard’s Aeneid translation than I do, and knows what the word “invented” means, yet this is the standard.  Or perhaps the emphasis is on "hallucinatory," in other words Marlowe invented blank verse as written by Marlowe.  Gorboduc's blank verse is not hallucinatory.

In the actual book, which I looked at in a bookstore, in the three pages tagged with “blank verse” in the index, Greenblatt says nothing about “invention” but instead argues that Marlowe’s use of blank verse in the two Tamburlaine plays was so successful, artistically and commercially, that it set blank verse as the standard for tragedy and history plays.  Which seems true to me.  Eh, the book is probably good.  Please read it and let me know.

Still, the evidence.  In two weeks I will put up something about Dido, Queen of Carthage, which I think of as Marlowe’s first play.  Maybe it is, maybe it is not.  Published in 1594, soon after Marlowe’s death, the title page says:

Written by Chriftopher Marlowe, and

Thomas Nafh. Gent.

Thomas Nashe is a writer of high interest, an imaginative satirist, but heck if I can hear him anywhere in Dido.  Some scholars with better ears than me agree, some do not.  Maybe Nashe edited the play for publication?  Maybe he wrote my favorite scenes in imitation of Marlowe?  Who knows.

I think there was a lot more co-writing and script doctoring in the London theater than we will ever know.  Publishing was changing rapidly, and the notion of authorship was changing as quickly, so evidence for authorship claims, authorship in our post-Romantic sense, is chaotic.  I take The Workes of Ben Jonson (1616), the first Folio if not the First Folio, as one extreme, Jonson getting his own plays and poems into print in a way that clearly says “These are mine, I wrote these.”  But my impression now is that there is more non-Shakespeare than we will ever know in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the earlier ones, and similarly more Shakespeare in plays we attribute to other writers.  Scenes, lines, even words.

In an issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman has Shakespeare and Jonson jointly improvise the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot song and teach it to a boy to spread around London.  The first line is Shakespear’s (“remember, remember”), the second Jonson’s.  Shakespeare thinks the song will quickly be forgotten; Jonson thinks it will last a hundred years.  A little parable about publication there.  But I think it gets at the practice of the time pretty well.  All of these writers knew each other.  Many worked together professionally, but how many more workshopped passages with each other at the tavern?

I will try to keep a light hand about authorship.  But at some point I have to make my choice, just like the biographer does.  He has to tell the story of Christopher Marlowe’s career as a spy.  I would prefer the story of why we think he might have been a spy.  Most people would not.

Next week: please join me in reading Dido, Queen of Carthage.  It is a fine piece of poetry.  The week after that I will begin writing on the two Tamburlaine plays.

I am in France right now so who knows when I might respond to comments.  Please go over to my Twitter to see photographs of my traveling companions.

The best books of 1516, 1616, and 1716 - Thou joy’st in better markes

The best books of the year!  Always a lot of fun. In this case, three years: 1516, 1616, and 1716.  Why not?

How would I know which are the best books of those years?  How many can I have possibly read?  Right.  So I just read the ones that centuries of other readers have told me are the best.  I am just repeating what they say.

My pick for 1516 is Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, at this point just the first forty cantos – the whole big thing will not be finished until 1532 – which are thrilling enough.  I’ll put Thomas More’s Utopia in second place.  There, those are the two books from the year that I have read.  Good ones.  Still, look at the Wikipedia entry for “1516 in art.”  Start with Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and work your way down.  Wow.  That’s where the creative energy is.

My pick for 1716 is: I don’t know.  Addison has shuttered the Spectator.  Pope is busy with his Iliad.  Swift is doing I don’t know what.  Voltaire is writing plays.  Congreve is not writing plays, having shifted entirely to politics.  Marivaux is not yet writing plays.  Defoe has not yet re-invented the novel.

I’ll have to go with the only 1716 text I am sure I have read, a couple of pages from John Gay’s satirical poem “Trivia: Or the Art of Walking the Streets of London,” as plucked out in The Penguin Book of English Verse (2000), a description of the weather, cleaning days, market days:

  When fishy Stalls with double Store are laid;
The golden-belly’d Carp, the broad-finn’d Maid,
Red-speckled Trouts, the Salmon’s silver Joul,
The jointed Lobster, and unscaly Soale,
And luscious ‘Scallops, to allure the tastes
Of rigid Zealots to delicious Fasts.

I should read the entire poem someday.

The best book of 1616 – now that’s an easy one.  It’s The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, Jonson’s First Folio, the inspiration for that later, more famous, First Folio.  Nine plays, of which three – Volpone, Epicoene, and The Alchemist – are unique masterpieces.  By “unique,” I mean no one else had ever written comedies quite like them.  Two clusters of poems: Epigrammes, satirical; The Forest, lyrical.  Then a number of masques and “entertainments,” also unusual texts, which I have only sampled.  I mean, I have not read this book, just most of its contents.  Complete plays in two volumes, complete poetry in another, masques in yet another.

The Forest includes a number of “To Celia” poems, like:

Drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes,
    And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kisse but in the cup,
   And Ile not looke for wine.

And:

Come my Celia, let us prove,
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever:
He, at length, our good will sever.

Etc., etc., perfect lovely singable fluff.  Other poems flatter, insult, seduce, flatter some more – one of the best, “To Penshurst,” flatters a house, an estate:

Thou joy’st in better markes, of soyle, of ayre,
    Of wood, of water: therein thou art faire.

I picked an illustration from 1616, “The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt” by Peter Paul Rubens that is preposterous nonsense, but I have seen it with my own eyes in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.  Huge, a monstrosity, but it has a lot going on.

Well, be glad there's nothing worse - Edwin Arlington Robinson's Shakespeare

As much as  I have enjoyed Edwin Arlington Robinson’s books, and as good as The Man against the Sky (1916) is, it may be time for me to switch to his Selected Poems.  Robinson is becoming more abstract; I am becoming more baffled.

Some of the abstraction is a move to an attempt to describe feelings or ideas at a more character-free level – at least I often can’t figure out who the characters are supposed to be – and some of it is a natural side effect of pared-down Robert Browning-like monologues.  I am supposed to be doing a lot of the work, I get that.

Begin with the title of “Bokardo.”  It is a term from formal logic, pure gibberish to me, given as a name to a man stricken with remorse and guilt to the point where he has perhaps attempted suicide.  He is confessing or complaining to the poet, who is unsympathetic.  The 120 lines are the poet’s ironic dismissal of Bokardo’s self-pity:

There’s a debt now on your mind
    More than any gold?
And there’s nothing you can find
    Out there in the cold?
Only – what’s his name? – Remorse?
And Death riding on his horse?
Well, be glad there’s nothing worse
    Than you have told.

Those last lines are brutal, as are a number of others.  It is possible that Bokardo is meant to be Robinson’s brother, who sold the family home at a loss and etc. etc., some list of irritating but petty nonsense that explain nothing about the poem, nor add anything to its imagery or moves toward wisdom:

They that have the least to fear
Question hardest what is here;
When long-hidden skies are clear,
    The stars look strange.

The great treat for me in this collection was the least abstract poem, “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford,” a 25-page monologue of one great poet talking about a greater.  Jonson is having a drink with a Stratfordian:

And I must wonder what you think of him –
All you down there where your small Avon flows
By Stratford, and where you’re an Alderman.

Nominally, he is grilling his guest about Shakespeare and his mysteries – Jonson presents Shakespeare as something of a cipher – but Jonson ends up doing all the talking.  This is all entirely plausible.

I gather something happened in his boyhood
Fulfilled him with a boy’s determination
To make Stratford all ‘ware of him.

The time of the poem is around Shakespeare’s retirement form playwriting, and he is given some kind of crisis of mortality:

“No, Ben,” he mused; “it’s Nothing.  It’s all Nothing.
We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re done;
Spiders and flies – we’re mostly one or t’other –
We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re done.”

Jonson suggests that Shakespeare get a dog, and dang it get his plays published (“what he owes to Gutenberg”).

He’ll do it when he’s old, he says.  I wonder.
He may not be so ancient as all that.
For such as he, the thing that is to do
Will do itself.

Just a wonderful tribute to “this mad, careful, proud, indifferent Shakespeare!” and to Jonson, too.  “I love the man this side idolatry.”

No post tomorrow.