THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Ben Jonson and the Comic Theatre
In the ‘Induction on the Stage’ to his London comedy Bartholomew Fair (acted 1614, published 1631) Ben(jamin)
Jonson (1572/3-1637) gives to the actor playing his scrivener (copyist) the claim that the new play which will follow
will be ‘merry, and as full of noise as sport, made to delight all, and to offend none’. This Induction initiates the
seepage between actor and non-actor and the interaction of illusion and reality on which the whole comedy is based. It
also introduces some pointed side-swipes at the tastes of contemporary audiences. ‘He that will swear Jeronimo or
Andronicus are the best plays yet’, the scrivener announces with reference to Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and to
Shakespeare’s earliest and bloodiest tragedy, ‘shall pass unexcepted at here as a man whose judgement shews it is
constant, and hath stood still these five and twenty, or thirty years’. He deliberately exaggerates the datedness of the
bombastic tragedies of the 1590s and implies that old fashions should now be laid to rest (though this may be an
ironic suggestion given that the young Jonson was said to have acted the part of Hieronimo and had later written
additional speeches for a revival of Kyd’s play). The scrivener’s subsequent comments on the theatrical vogue for
tragi-comical mixed drama, of the kind evolved in Shakespeare’s last phase, are, however, far less patronizingly
indulgent. ‘Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries’ are disdained as indecorous; they are unreal, they offend against
nature, and they are vulgarly marred by a ‘concupiscence of jigs and dances’.
Shakespeare was, however, not alone in pandering to the public demand for romantic escapism and for happy
resolutions to potentially tragic dramas of which Jonson complained. In the address ‘to the Reader’ prefaced to the
Hellenic pastoral The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1608) John Fletcher (1579-1625) insisted that tragi-comedy was not so
called because it intermixed mirth and murder, but because it eschewed death ‘which is enough to make it no tragedy,
yet brings some near to it, which is enough to make it no comedy’. A tragi-comedy represented the sufferings and joys
of ‘familiar people’ and, despite Sir
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Philip Sidney’s strictures in The Defence of Poesie, it could happily intermingle the elevated and the ordinary (‘a God
is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy’). Fletcher, who in his close and successful
collaborations - notably with Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) - worked in a variety of theatrical modes, had evolved a
particular kind of play characterized by its heterogeneous and sometimes startling combination of intrigue and
romance, of the amorous and the perilous, of the bucolic and the lyrical. His tragi-comedies reflect back on the prose
pastorals of Sidney and his Italian models and they employ the formula of a happy denouement which implies that
even in an imperfect world, virtue could be perfectly rewarded. The plot of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, or
Love lies a-bleeding (c. 1609, published 1620) shows injustices reversed, disasters averted, and heirs restored to their
rights once assumed disguises and contrived misunderstandings have finally been removed. In their A King and No
King (1611, published 1619) King Arbaces’s incestuous passion for his supposed sister and his potentially tragic plans
for murder, rape, and suicide are somewhat arbitrarily, but necessarily, dissipated by the timely revelation that he is in
fact neither a king nor a brother. Fletcher’s collaboration with Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613, printed
1634), draws on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale in order to retell a story of knightly rivalries, vexed relationships, and
sudden reversals. In his concluding speech, however, Duke Theseus offers a distinctly un-Chaucerian meditation on
the whims of fortune which might appropriately stand at the end of any of these tragi-comedies. For Theseus, the
play’s paradoxes and disconcertions can be interpreted as reflections of the unpredictability of Fate and the timing of
heavenly justice: ‘O you heavenly charmers, | What things you make of us! For what we lack | We laugh, for what we
have, are sorry; still | Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful | for that which is ...’.
Francis Beaumont’s rattling burlesque, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1607, printed 1613) differs markedly
from his tragi-comic collaborations with Fletcher. It is set in modern London, not in an imagined Arcadian landscape,
and it begins as the Prologue to a performance of a genteel play at the Blackfriars Theatre is interrupted by an unruly
citizen and his wife who demand that the actors perform something more to their middle-brow taste. Worthy London
merchants, this uppity grocer claims, are mocked and irritated by the courtly prejudices of most modern writers;
proper subjects of drama, he suggests, might better be found in the mercantile achievements of past and present
London. The grocer also wants a part in the play to be reserved for his apprentice, the cocky amateur actor, Rafe.
When the citizens get their way and Rafe mounts the boards, chivalry and trade are forced first into an incongruous
embrace and ultimately into an unconvincingly genial reconciliation. Although it was not a success with its first
audiences, The Knight of the Burning Pestle vividly demonstrates the extent to which City manners and City
characters had come to determine the subjects chosen by the London-based comic dramatists of the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries.
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