THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

obliged by a court (which is only marginally less shifty than he is) to become the permanent invalid he once pretended
to be. Venetian justice in Volpone is not the ideal held up in The
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Merchant of Venice. But then Jonson the dramatist, unlike his ‘beloved’ Shakespeare, seems to have possessed a far
greater tendency to distrust both romance and political ideals.
Jonson and the High Roman Fashion
Although Jonson did not necessarily trust ideals and idealists, he was certainly capable of adulating them if and when
occasion demanded. ‘Occasion’ was generally the coincidence of aristocratic aspiration and aristocratic patronage in
an age when aristocracy and an aristocratic culture mattered. Jonson, perhaps the most truly neo-Roman of all English
writers of the Renaissance period, readily associated himself with Horace and associated the subjects of Horace’s
poetry with the ambiguities and anomalies of the reign of Augustus. The breadth of his classical reading was
particularly evident in the printed form of the masque Hymenaei (originally performed at court in 1606 as part of the
celebrations of the marital alliance between two upper-class families), for the extensive scholarly notes which
supplement the text render it virtually an antiquarian treatise on Roman marriage customs. It was, however, with the
poems collected as Epigrammes and The Forrest in the 1616 Folio that Jonson’s direct debt to the Roman poets
became most evident (the name of The Forrest, for example, translated the Latin word ‘silva’, both a forest and a
collection). The Epigrammes, which Jonson considered ‘the ripest fruit’ of his studies, and which he claimed to value
above his plays, contain pithy addresses to his Muse, to King James, to prominent noblemen and noblewomen, to
literary friends, allies, and enemies, all expressed as rhymed English adaptations of the compact forms perfected in
Latin by Juvenal and Horace. In epigrams 103 and 105, for example, Lady Mary Wroth is praised as the ‘faire
crowne’ of her fair sex, as living up to her famous family and, most elegantly, as the reincarnation of the classical
deities (‘Madame, had all antiquitie beene lost, | All historie seal’d up, and fables crost; | That we had left us, nor by
time, nor place | Least mention of a Nymph, a Muse, a Grace ... Who could not but create them all from you?’). Lady
Mary’s husband, Sir Robert Wroth, is the recipient of a Horatian epistle, included in The Forrest, which contrasts the
vices, sports, and entertainments of the city and the court with the alternative pleasures of country life. Instead of
masques (‘the short braverie of the night’) Wroth can enjoy sound sleep or, from his bed, hear ‘the loud stag speake’.
He can delight in the ordered and fruitful progress of the seasons and ‘live innocent’ while others ‘watch in guiltie
armes, and stand | The furie of a rash command’. A similar evocation of refinement in gentlemanly retirement marks
‘To Penshurst’, an address to the country estate of Sir Robert Sidney (Mary Wroth’s father). The poem’s learned
recalls of certain of Martial’s epigrams and its replay of the anti-urban moralism which pervades Roman poetry of the
first century AD help shape a tribute to the aristocratic values that Jonson
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chooses to see as eternal. Penshurst is neither architecturally pretentious nor the expression of its owner’s oppressive
pride. Its park and its tenantry share an extraordinary fertility: fat carps run into nets, eels jump on land in front of
fishermen, figs, grapes, and quinces mature in order, and the ‘ripe daughters’ of farming families come to the house
bearing ‘an embleme of themselves, in plum, or peare’. Above all, Jonson seems to find an especial joy in his own
courteous reception at Penshurst:
Where comes no guest, but is allow’d to eate,
Without his feare, and of the lord’s owne meate:
Where the same beere, and bread, and self same wine,
That is his Lordships, shall be also mine.
And I not faine to sit (as some, this day,
At great mens tables) and yet dine away.
‘To Penshurst’ purposefully dwells on the idea of the open-handed generosity, the easy elegance, and the unaffected
cultivation which Jonson saw as linking a modern aristocracy to the idealized patrician patrons of the ancient Roman
poets.
In the eighty-ninth of his prose Discoveries (‘Nobilium Ingenia’) he offered a radically different analysis of the
political characteristics of the ruling class. Some noblemen, he insists, serve their prince disinterestedly; others ‘love