A Jonsonian Encomium

The man of the week is Ben Jonson: ruddy, large, convivial, viciously witty, convict, convert, pedant, satirist, playwright, poet laureate. How has it taken me so long to meet him? His characters – tricksy, seamy, comic London underbelly figures – seem to be the Jacobean forebears of Dickens’. (Sir Epicure Mammon, Justice Overdo, Dol Common are the easy friends of Bumble, M’Choakumchild and Vholes).

Jonson’s best speeches, however, clearly belong to his puritans. Here is the wonderfully named Zeal-in-the-land Busy (nearly beat by Tribulation Wholesome in The Alchemist, responding to a puppet show in Bartholemew Fair (1614)

Busy: Down with Dagon, down with Dagon! ‘Tis I will no longer endure your profanations...I will remove Dagon there, I say, that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the Brethren; a very great beam, a exceeding great beam...Thy profession is damnable, and in pleading for it thou dost plead for Baal. I have long opened my mouth wide and gaped, I have gaped as the oyster for the tide, after thy destruction; but cannot compass it by suit or dispute; so that I look for a bickering ere long, and then a battle.

What rhetoric.

Comments

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .

When the Lights Go Out

Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...

My Mad Girl

[A Question I am Not the First to Ask: What is it about women and madness? Are they more susceptible to delusion than men are? The subject of many books and hypotheses, we wonder if madness dogs the steps of creative women (eg. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman…) Is it a biological coincidence or a recurring phenomenon? Is it socially reinforced? Do men fear the hysterical women? Is it the uterus (Greek “hysteria”) which turns the brain?] The reclusive writer, the late Janet Frame, winner of all of New Zealand’s literary prizes, spent much time in institutions and in therapy and, as far as I can tell, her novels commonly include themes of estrangement, mental health and madness. Frame considered her 1963 novel Towards Another Summer too personal be published in her lifetime. As she’d already written an autobiography ( Angel at My Table , made into a film by Jane Campion) and been this subject of several biographies, this is telling. Towards Another Su...

A Shelf of One's Own

Search This Blog