Volpone and Other Plays (4 page)

The structure of the comedy appears to be casual – the fresh complications of Quarlous's disguise and of Dame Purecraft's falling in love with a madman are brought in almost off-handedly at the closing moments of Act Four – but the underlying design is always clear.
Bartholomew Fair
ends genially: the sober, hypocritical,
and authoritarian figures, the Puritan and the Justice, killjoys both, are discomfited. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, with his prodigious rhetorical tirade against the theatre, is out-manoeuvred in debate after the puppet-play-within-the-play by Lantern's puppet, and retires crestfallen. Justice Overdo (whose Christian name Adam suggests that he is a universal figure) sheds his disguise for that final moment towards which all satiric comedy inexorably moves – the judgement:

Now to my enormities: look upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield! The example of justice, and mirror of magistrates, the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity. Hearken unto my labours…!

But Overdo is silenced when one of the ‘prostitutes' is unmasked, and turns out to be Mistress Overdo. The end of the play is good-humoured and forgiving, prolonging the spirit of holiday: Justice Overdo invites all the
dramatis personae
back to his house for supper. The motives of the ‘upright' have been questioned; the knaves and the opportunists go free.

The appeal of
Bartholomew Fair
is in the rich and vivid execution rather than in any moral content. This execution presents difficulties for today's reader – difficulties that, as in
The Alchemist
, spring from Jonson's rich and detailed evocation of Jacobean life through contemporary and local reference, and through specific jargons and slang. Although the modern reader quickly appreciates the
vitality
of this comedy, its rich comprehensiveness, he is bound to find a good deal of it (Dan Knockem's ‘vapours', for example, or Whit's stage-Irish) very tiresome. And while certain characters spring vividly to life – the Justice, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Humphrey Wasp, Ursula – others in the large cast of characters nowadays remain obscure. Part of the pleasure for the first audiences must have been that shock of recognition as they saw their own great Fair put vividly and realistically upon the stage of the Hope Theatre at Bankside in October 1614, only a couple of months after the Fair itself had been held as usual at Smithfield.

Kenneth Tynan once called
Bartholomew Fair
‘a documentary'
¹
and another drama critic, Professor Eric Bentley, regards Shakespeare's major history-sequence as forming
with this comedy of Jonson's
‘the great masterpiece of social realism in English'.
¹
Jonson, in an almost pedantic way, crammed a great mass of Jacobean life, idiom, and local colour, into
Bartholomew Fair
. The term ‘documentary' is a somewhat bleak description of his achievement in this comedy and does scant justice to its exuberance and its richness of caricature. I should prefer to call
Bartholomew Fair
a cartoon, and to regard as distinctive its animation, its vigour, and its ‘panoramic' coverage of Jacobean types. Some day, I hope, Miss Joan Littlewood will direct the play in such a way as to bring to life in modern stage terms both its stylization and its realism, and to give us ‘the beauty of it hot', for, literary and intellectual though Jonson's desire to cram everything in may have been, the play has analogies with the visual arts.
Bartholomew Fair
may be inferior to
Volpone
and
The Alchemist
, but it links Jonson with that other celebrant of the riotous life of Bartholomew Fair, the great English cartoonist, Thomas Rowlandson.

The aims of the present edition are modest. The text of
Volpone
and
The Alchemist
is that of the First Folio
Workes
(1616) seen through the press by Jonson himself; that of
Bartholomew Fair
is based upon the posthumous Second Folio (1640), sheets of which Jonson may have seen and partly corrected before his death.

Jonson took great pains to see that his play-scripts were accurately presented to the Jacobean reader, and he adopted a standard method for the printing of the plays. Like other Elizabethan dramatists he did not give locations for his scenes save for a general indication that the action was set in London or in Venice. His practice was to start off at Act 1 Scene 1, and usually to begin a new scene (Scene II, Scene III, etc.) at the entrance of another character, a style which never became standard for printing plays in England as it did in France. At the head of each scene he listed the characters appearing in it:
Subtle. Face. Dol. Mammon
., etc. The first-named character is always the first speaker, and Jonson never gave any further attribution of the opening speech. He did
not indicate the precise point at which a character enters or exits when these entrances or exits do not mark the beginning or end of a scene. He gave few stage-directions (save for
Bartholomew Fair
, where the largeness of the cast and the ‘busy' action seems to have made stage-directions more necessary), and these were always printed in the margin. The following conventions have been used in this edition:

The spelling has been modernized throughout, as has the punctuation, to make the sense clear to the modern reader. Thus I print
murder
where Jonson used
murther, venture
for his
venter
(save where rhyme has to be preserved), and so on. Obvious misprints have been silendy corrected. The minor emendations and corrections which are standard in modern editions have likewise been silently included, but, where a new reading has been adopted from a recent scholarly edition, the fact has been recorded among the critical notes at the back. Jonson's plays survive in an uncommonly good state, and I have not included a list of textual variants, knowing as I do that scholars and graduate-students who need access to the full bibliographical and textual apparatus will always prefer to use the Folios themselves, or the Oxford edition, or some other old-spelling reprint. In past participles Jonson's
'd
has been extended to
ed
, and his
ed
has been stressed
èd
. Jonson's
th', i', ha', gi'
, etc. (for
the, in, have, give
, etc.) have been retained; they reflect the idiomatic usages and the pronunciation of his own day, and in dialect speeches especially they are necessary – and helpful – to the actor. The colloquial
an
(if), which Jonson spelt
and
or
an'
, has been spelt
an'
. Jonson habitually used italics for outlandish and technical words. These have usually been dispensed with. Capitals have sometimes been introduced for clarity or emphasis, and to guide the reader or the actor.

It would be pedantic to adhere rigidly to Jonson's scene-divisions in a modern edition, especially as so much of the action in his
comedies is continuous. Editorial scene-divisions have been made only when a change of location has to be indicated (see below), and all these are printed in square brackets: [
SCENE TWO
]. Jonson's own scene-divisions have been retained in abbreviated form and placed towards the margin: 1, i, 1, ii, 1, iii, etc. The reader can thus appreciate at a glance the scenic structure of the comedies, while not experiencing the sense of a break in the action. Also, there is an advantage in preserving Jonson's scene-divisions for students who wish to use this text while referring to the commentaries in, say, the Oxford edition. The running-titles throughout use the editorial scene-divisions, though square brackets are here dispensed with.

At the top of the first page of the original prompt-copy for the King's Men's performances of
Volpone
there may well have been scrawled ‘A bed thrust out. Volpone in it'. In this edition locations are added in square brackets: [
Volpone's house
.] or [
The Fair
.]. These locations have been kept brief, and it is emphasized that they are sometimes conjectural. In the front-matter to the individual comedies I have summarized the sort of problems that occasionally arise about the precise location of particular scenes – problems which a director or a stage-designer can solve by adopting a composite-set.

Jonson's marginal stage-directions have usually been retained, though seldom kept in the margin. Square brackets indicate editorial stage-directions (many of them stemming from nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors), but sometimes a cryptically brief authorial stage-direction has been superseded by one in square brackets. Occasionally a stage-direction by Jonson has been placed in round brackets within a speech.

The names of speakers are usually printed as contractions in the Jacobean editions of Jonson's comedies. These have here been expanded throughout, so that similar speech-tags like
Volp
. and
Volt., Corb
. and
Corv
., no longer confuse the reader, but are replaced by
Volpone, Voltore, Corbaccio
, and
Corvino
. The
Win
. and
Winw
. (which muddled the first printers of
Bartholomew Fair
) are here replaced by
Mistress Littlewit
and
Winwife
.

The notes in any edition of plays by Jonson present a problem, for the range of his classical, contemporary, topographical, and other references is immense. The appropriateness of a mythological allusion or the sharpness of a Jacobean reference can often be appreciated by a present-day reader only if he refers to the notes. I have tried to divide notes into two broad categories – glosses on Jacobean expressions and on words that have changed their meaning are printed as footnotes, while explanatory notes on classical and literary references, proper- and place-names, and allusions to Jacobean life appear with the longer critical comments at the back. Occasionally, where the reader might miss the point of a speech, the word ‘Note' appears at the foot of the page to refer him to the back of this book. Usually no such indication has been considered necessary, and it is hoped that the reader who is puzzled by a particular difficulty
will
find it explained in a note. At times he will look in vain for this help. Comprehensive annotation of all three comedies would lay too heavy a burden upon Jonson, and most readers will prefer, first time through, being carried forward by the pace of the developing action and by the rhythm and buoyancy of the dialogue, to being slavishly dependent on what S. Potter once called ‘the dispiriting apparatus of notes'.
¹

As the line-numbering of
The Alchemist
and of the verse-scenes of
Volpone
corresponds with that in the standard Oxford edition by Herford and the Simpsons, a zealous reader can make full use of the thorough annotation in their volumes of commentaries. For the prose-scenes of
Volpone
and for
Bartholomew Fair
my abbreviations of Jonson's own scene-divisions (1, i, 1, ii, etc.) should also make for easy reference to massively annotated editions. I have made no attempt to make a comprehensive survey of the numerous parallels with classical and Renaissance authors, nor have I tried to explain every learned allusion. Those who want to know, for example, that in
The Alchemist
, 1, i, 1, Subtle's ‘I fart at
thee!' is like the Latin
oppedo
and the Greek χαταπ
á½³
ρδω will want to make use of Volume X of the Oxford
Ben Jonson
; others of us will continue to believe that such words were actually heard sometimes on the lips of Jonson's contemporaries.

In preparing the text and notes I have, of course, benefited greatly from the work of my many predecessors, particularly the labours of C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Professor Harry Levin's excellent one-volume
Ben Jonson: Selected Works
was, alas, unannotated, but, throughout, I have been guided, enlightened, and occasionally inhibited, by the scholarship of previous editors and by the insight of critics and commentators. Any editor is greatly indebted to others. For example, a casual glance at the editions of
Bartholomew Fair
by Eugene M. Waith (1963) and Edward B. Partridge (1964) will reveal how deep is their debt to E. A. Horsman's edition for the Revels Plays (1960); I had the good fortune to be able to consult and make use of the work of all three gentlemen. I am grateful to Professor David Daiches and Mr R. P. C. Mutter for advice and encouragement.

The bibliography on p.
33
and the prefatory matter to the three separate comedies show that there is no lack of critical and scholarly books on Ben Jonson. There has indeed been something of a Jonson revival in the United States with Professor Levin, dedicatee of at least two striking books on the dramatist, as the
doyen
of American Jonsonians. The general reader must be warned, however, that Jonson's notorious learning has called forth an answering pedantry in some of his more recent American commentators and scholarly exegetes which is manifested either in a fancy line in chapter headings, ‘Comoedy of Affliction' and ‘(Although no Paralel)', or in mandarin prose:

With Zeal-of-the-Land Busy… we are back on the highroad of linguistic caricature, where every cobblestone, every pebble, shrieks
affectation, and the whole gives off a lurid phosphorescence more like that of a Martian than an earthly landscape…

Unlike Busy… Overdo is auto-intoxicate.

Scholars who have immolated themselves in some part of ‘The Background' (Renaissance philosophy, rhetoric, satire, psychology, alchemy, the Great Chain of Being itself) are sometimes slow to get back to Jonson's marvellous liveliness on the printed page and to the theatrical potentialities of his comedies.