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Ben Jonson and the Illusion of Completeness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

L. A. Beaturline
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Extract

IN Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell makes a significant distinction between two kinds of infinity. One kind is illustrated by the progression from zero to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, on to infinity; Russell calls this an infinite progression, and it is unlimited. The other idea is illustrated by the division of an interval between, say, one and two; first divide it into halves, then divide each of those halves, and so on infinitely. This is a compact series or an infinite class, and it is limited. The infinite progression and the infinite class are quite different ideas, and they have different philosophical uses. I suggest that a similar distinction may be made concerning literary forms, and that this distinction helps us to understand what is new about Ben Jonson's dramatic method. The distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature, I believe, but Jonson is especially interesting because he is somewhat of a pioneer.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 1969 , pp. 51 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1925–52), vii, 583, 586–587, 646–647. All quotations of Jonson's text come from this edition.

2 See Edward Partridge, The Broken Compass (New York, 1958) and John Enck, Jonson and the Comic Truth (Madison, Wis., 1957). The extravagant conceit as part of Jonson's debt to old comedy is explained by Ray Heffner, Jr., in his “Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson,” English Stage Comedy, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York, 1955), pp. 74–97. The adaptation of late morality form is discussed by Alan Dessen in “The Alchemist: Jonson's ‘Estates’ Play,” Renaissance Drama, vii (1964), 35–54. Dessen is on the verge of making my point when he sees a “panoramic cross section of English society” in The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, (pp. 49–50), but he has not shown the importance of Jonson's strict limits on his material. I do not find his conception of thesis and demonstration specific enough to tell us much about Jonson.

3 Paul Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago, 1954), p. 85, makes a similar observation. Also see the mention of the Alchemist in Richard Levin's very thorough discussion of “The Structure of Bartholomew Fair” PMLA, ixxx (1965), 176.

4 See Hugh Kenner's “Art in a Closed Field,” VQR, xxxviii (1962), 597–613, to which I am generally indebted.

5 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1962; first ed., 1944), p. 353.

6 “The Universe of Robert Herrick,” Auckland Univ. College Bulletin, No. 38, English Series, No. 4, 1950.

7 “Of the Coulers of Good and Evil a Fragment,” published at the end of Bacon's Essays (1597), sigs. F4-F4V.

8 European Literature of the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper Torchbook ed., 1963; first German ed., 1948), p. 508. More recent studies of Spenser have shown the survival of this kind of organization in the Epithalamium and Faerie Queene: A. Kent Hieatt, Short Time's Endless Monument (New York, 1960).

9 Endeavours of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, Wis., 1954), pp. 288–294.

10 Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 176–177.

11 Horace's praise of Virgil in jonson's Poetaster (v.i.136-138).

12 See Levin, pp. 176–178.

13 Some of the following comments appeared in a briefer form in the introduction to my edition of Epicoene (Lincoln, Neb., 1966).