Arts Commentary: Not Just Shakespeare — “Anonymous” Wrongs Ben Jonson As Well
The awkward logic of Anonymous turns the initially stalwart Ben Jonson into a ludicrous double-dealer, who advances his supreme tribute (“Soul of the age!”) to a man he knows to have been a fraud and imposter.
Anonymous. Directed by Roland Emmerich. At cinemas in Boston and around the world.
Ben Jonson — Shakespeare isn’t the only great playwright to take it on the chin in “Anonymous.”
Much was written in defense of William Shakespeare as the man from Stratford when Anonymous opened in cineplexes last week. The film proposes that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the author of the plays, forced by politics and breeding to keep his identity a secret. Granted, there were the usual dewy-eyed equivocators: we had critic Ben Brantley in the New York Times declare that it really didn’t matter who wrote the plays. Academics may go off the deep end, as Brantley suggests, but that doesn’t excuse discarding the value of historical research and the search for facts.
Amid the rush to save Shakespeare, no one talked about the film’s maltreatment of another playwriting giant of the era, Ben Jonson, the author of Volpone and The Alchemist. Jonson plays a major role in the plot, helping, in a bumbling way, to set up a bogus Shakespeare at the behest of de Vere. Few in academia or in the media pointed out how making the torturous de Vere scenario make (sort of) sense means turning one of the sharpest satirists in the English language into a stooge.
What more, Jonson’s part in the plot is bewilderingly sketchy: If the dramatist knew the truth (and hinted at it to others as he does in the film), why wasn’t he murdered? After all, the film theorizes Christopher Marlowe was offed (by the phony Shakespeare) because he guessed the truth. As someone who admires Jonson, and hoped that a major film might spark a production or two of his plays (no such luck, given how he comes off here), I wanted someone knowledgeable to speak up for his character. I asked one of the world’s leading scholars on Jonson, Ian Donaldson, to address Anonymous and its view of the great dramatist and poet.
Donaldson’s biography Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press), will be published here in December. I have been reading the volume with great pleasure. Donaldson is also one of a team of editors who have completed The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge University Press), which is slated for a January 2012 release.
— Bill Marx
By Ian Donaldson
Sebastian Armesto as the double-dealing Ben Jonson in “Anonymous.”
Roland Emmerich’s new movie, Anonymous, scripted by John Orloff, presents some interesting facts about the age of Shakespeare that your teachers at school may have failed to pass on to you. First, that Queen Elizabeth had a number of illegitimate children—including Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford—with whom she later had passionate affairs.
Next, that the Earl of Southampton, another of the Queen’s bastards, was in fact sired by the Earl of Oxford, who incidentally had written A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the age of nine in order to please the Queen. Then, that Christopher Marlowe was murdered in the streets of London by William Shakespeare after threatening to reveal the major secret upon which the biopic turns: that Shakespeare, a cunning but semi-literate actor—he can read, it seems, but not write—was a charlatan who fraudulently claimed the authorship of plays that were actually the work (you’d guessed this already?) of the handsome and cultivated Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
And that Ben Jonson’s patron, Sir Robert Cecil, hated the theater so much that he tortured Jonson with red-hot pincers in order to discover the whereabouts of those plays of Shakespeare—no, I’m sorry, I’m going too fast, of Edward de Vere—with which he’d been secretly entrusted. That Jonson bravely withstood these tests and went on to publish these plays in the folio edition of 1623 that’s conventionally attributed to Shakespeare, foxily prefacing the volume with a great poem of praise ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us” so that the reputation of the long-dead Edward de Vere would not be besmirched by the vile accusation that he’d wasted his time writing these wretched trifles.
“‘Anonymous’? Yes, I’ve always enjoyed his work,” says Vanessa Redgrave as the aged Elizabeth thoughtfully, having asked who has written the entertainment she’s about to watch. Many of the Queen’s subjects might have echoed her sentiments. As theater-goers, few would have had any idea of the identity of the persons who had written the plays they came to see. While the names of the leading players—of the Alleyns and the Burbages—were popularly known, the same could not be said of those shadowy, backroom figures who’d composed the works in which these stars performed.
“Playwright! Playwright! Playwright! Playwright!” clamours the crowd in Emmerich’s film after the first of Edward de Vere’s big successes at the Rose Theatre; and William Shakespeare, sensing his moment, moves swiftly forward to seize the applause and touch the outstretched hands of the groundlings, who drag him into the pit, passing his spread-eagled body triumphantly across the auditorium. Such a scene is more evocative of the modern rock concert than of the early modern theater.
The very word “playwright,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), along with the word “dramatist,” was still unknown in this period, not entering the language until much later in the century—although Ben Jonson, curiously enough, does use the word on a couple of occasions, unremarked by the OED, as an inventive term of contempt. No one at this time, however, is likely to have called for the author in the way the movie depicts or have cared very much who he was, or have desperately wanted to fondle his body. There were no theater programs, and the bills posted in the playhouse (as shown in this movie), announcing the piece as “written by William Shakespeare,” are an anachronism on the part of the film’s makers. No theater bills bearing the name of the author are known to have existed in England until the late 1690s, when their appearance attracted comment as something of a novelty.
Authorial anonymity (in short) was an unremarkable fact in the early modern theater, and the supposed imperative that drives this movie’s fragile plot—the urgent need felt by Edward de Vere to present his plays to the world under the name of a readily identifiable member of the London theatrical community—hardly serves to explain its action. If he was eager to see his plays on stage, de Vere might simply have conveyed the manuscripts discreetly to Philip Henslowe, and the public would not have been greatly bothered by the lack of an author’s name. But in that case, of course, the “darker story” that Sir Derek Jacobi promises to present us with at the outset of this movie would quickly have collapsed.
The one writer keen to imprint his name in the minds of the public and elevate the standing of the dramatic author at this time happened to be Ben Jonson, to whom appropriately in this version of events de Vere makes his first approaches, asking that he present de Vere’s plays to the public as writings of his own. In one of the film’s more credible touches—helpful to its opening strategy, though fatal to its larger designs—Jonson indignantly refuses this tawdry gambit as “an affront to the muses” and, more importantly, to his own theatrical ambitions. The historical Ben Jonson regarded with contempt those who tried to pass the writings of other people off as their own, a practice he excoriated throughout his Epigrams and in his satirical comedy, Poetaster. That play launches the word “plagiary” (from the Latin plagiare, to kidnap) into the English language and explores, with pioneering rigour, the emerging concept of intellectual property, which was to be of increasing significance to authors and their lawyers in the centuries to come.
Jonson’s verses addressed “To the Reader,” placed at the front of the 1623 Shakespeare first folio, show a similar concern for the protocols of attribution, vouching for the fact that the figure depicted in Martin Droeshout’s somewhat clumsy engraving was indeed the author of the plays presented within this monumental volume.
This figure that thou here see’st put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature, to out-do the life.
Oh, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass.
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture but his book.
For those wanting to propose an alternative candidate as author of the Shakespeare canon, these lines have always been a major stumbling block. Jonson knew and loved Shakespeare well, had worked closely with him in the theater, and was a devoted though not uncritical admirer of his writings. His verses serve in much the same manner as an authenticating signature on a passport photo, declaring that this man was indeed the person he purported to be. Shakespeare’s personality—so Jonson declares in the longer poem that followed these lines (“To the Memory of My Beloved . . . “) was deeply interwoven with the writings he created, which bear his unmistakable DNA, imprinting and perpetuating his very name:
Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue: even so, the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines:
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.
In the fantastically imagined circumstances of the film, Jonson helps Heminge and Condell publish the first folio in order to honor a promise he has made, years earlier, to Edward de Vere. But assuming that to have been his motive, there would still have been no reason for Jonson to have offered such a passionate declaration that these plays carry the very image of a quite different progenitor, William Shakespeare. The awkward logic of the movie turns the initially stalwart Ben Jonson into a ludicrous double-dealer, who advances his supreme tribute (“Soul of the age!”), to a man he knows to have been a fraud and imposter.
Ian Donaldson — the historical Ben Jonson regarded with contempt those who tried to pass the writings of other people off as their own.
Counterfactual history, when openly practised, has the power to stretch and stimulate the mind. What if John F. Kennedy had lived? What if Charles I had avoided the Civil War? What if there had been no American Revolution? What if Communism had not collapsed? (a handful of examples from Niall Fergusson’s recent collection, Virtual History). What if Shakespeare didn’t write the works attributed to him? What if these were really the writings of the Earl of Oxford? These are legitimate and provocative questions, which literary and historical scholars ignore at their own peril. The disappointing thing about this film is not that it poses such questions, but that it fudges them so ludicrously, mixing counterfactual history with determined advocacy of a threadbare thesis.
An educational package accompanying the movie, designed by Sony Pictures for use in American high schools, suggests that it is “impossible to believe that a mere grammar school graduate could have written the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare.” One hopes that students are also directed to some at least of the scholarly literature that over recent years has decisively exploded this facile, old-fashioned belief.
Those who sit patiently in the cinema as the credits roll are finally rewarded with the revelation that the film “is a work of fiction” and that any resemblance to actual people and events is “entirely coincidental and unintended.” Had that cautious, lawyerly statement been more positively advanced at an earlier moment, it might have been possible to view the movie—which is never dull, containing as it does a delicious performance by Vanessa Redgrave as the dotty Queen and some startling digitized effects—with greater tolerance and curiosity.
Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over three decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.
Tagged: Anonymous, Ben Jonson, biography, Elizabeth l, Ian Donaldson
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Just out of curiosity, if Professor Donaldson is still available to discuss the contents of this posting, I wonder how he would assess the relevance of Ben Jonson’s longtime association with Lord Chamberlain Pembroke in terms of the mutual association of both men with the 1623 folio?
It was an honor to speak with Ian Donaldson, one of the leading scholars on Ben Jonson in the world. This was one of the few features which dealt how Jonson was dealt with in the film. I would attempt to contact Donaldson through the monumental new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson — he was one of the editors.
There is much in what Professor Donaldson writes that is worthy of consideration and debate, but let us start from this remark:
“Jonson’s verses addressed “To the Reader,” placed at the front of the 1623 Shakespeare first folio, show a similar concern for the protocols of attribution, vouching for the fact that the figure depicted in Martin Droeshout’s somewhat clumsy engraving was indeed the author of the plays presented within this monumental volume.”
This figure that thou here see’st put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature, to out-do the life.
Oh, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass.
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture but his book.
Professor Donaldson is to be commended on reprinting the entirety of this droll poem by Jonson, which he signed in his characteristic epigrammatic formula, “B.I.” (cf his Epigrammes, 1616, the only other work which, to my knowledge, he signed in this elliptical fashion), but in doing so I am afraid he exposes some of the weaknesses of his attempt to enlist Jonson on the side of orthodox bardology.
Many readers will fail to be impressed by his conclusion that Jonson’s poem “shows a concern for the protocols of attribution” — whatever that is supposed to mean. The logic of the poem is clear; the engraver was unable, Jonson claims, to match the author’s wit, and therefore the reader should look not on the engraving but on the book if he is in search of the real author. The oddity of prefixing verses to an expensive engraving that damn it with such faint praises as to all but declare it a red herring is only enhanced by comparison of the engraving itself, which Donaldson admits is “somewhat clumsy,” especially when viewed alongside similar productions of the period, not to mention Droeshout’s other engravings, which show him to have been a master craftsman with a thorough command over all the relevant skills of perspective, etc., required to complete a “less clumsy” rendering.
This may explain why for over two centuries the Droeshout has been suspected of being some sort of droll joke at the expense of the assumptions of traditional Shakespearean criticism, a suspicion that Jonson’s verses do little to dispel. Here, for example, is how Leah Marcus in her 1987 *Puzzling Shakespeare* puts the matter:
The poem “undermines the visual power of the portrait by insisting on it as something constructed and `put’ there” (18). The net effect of engraving and poem, argues Marcus, is to set in motion a competition between poem and portrait in which the two elements are “vying for the reader’s attention” (19). Marcus goes on to describe the net effect of image and poem as “Protestant,” “rhetorically turbulent,” and “iconoclastic,” concluding that the folio design has the effect of “set[ting] readers off on a treasure hunt for the author” (19). Hmm….a treasure hunt for the author? What could that be about?
Further details on Marcus analysis are available here.
There is much more to say, but perhaps this is enough for one post. Naturally I should be most grateful if Professor Donaldson would care to reply. Although I have not had the pleasure yet of reading his biography, I am familiar with several other major biographies of Jonson as well as much of the relevant literature for assessing Jonson’s role in the Shakespearean enigma. While I share some of his misgivings about Anonymous, having studied the history of the authorship question for over twenty years now, I am confident that his analysis in this blog misconstrues some of the most important elements of evidence in the case, including, importantly, the logic, import, and historical context (i.e., the Spanish Marriage crisis of 1621-23), of Jonson’s droll epigram.
Thank you for the opportunity to offer these comments for your readers.
Now let us consider a second problem with Professor Donaldson’s hasty assurance of Jonson’s fidelity to a transparent and unproblematic endorsement of the orthodox myth of Shakespeare. He writes as follows:
Shakespeare’s personality—so Jonson declares in the longer poem that followed these lines (“To the Memory of My Beloved . . . “) was deeply interwoven with the writings he created, which bear his unmistakable DNA, imprinting and perpetuating his very name:
Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue: even so, the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines:
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.
Again we we may note that the rhetoric runs far in advance of — and attempts unsuccessfully to control the reader’s reception of — the actual text in question. The lines cited by Professor Donaldson of course come from *near the end* of Jonson’s 80-line encomium “To the memory of My Beloved.” These begin as follows:
To draw no envy, SHAKSPEARE, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ;
While I confess thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
‘Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise ;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right ;
Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance ;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron ; what could hurt her more ?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin: Soul of the age!
The reader will note a surprising emphasis on this exordium (introduction) on the likelihood that the bard’s work will become the object of “seeliest ignorance,” “blind affection,” or even “crafty malice” which “think(s) to ruin where it seemed to raise.” Jonson even predicates his encomium with the surprising admission that “these ways/ Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise.”
Why is that? we may wonder, if we have not had our critical thinks skills already dulled by an overly incredulous belief in the the blind faiths of our age.
What is Jonson trying to say here, anyway?
I am afraid that Professor Donaldson’s cliched interpretations will not help us here, since he assures us that we must take Jonson’s words at their face value. This, of course, is advice that runs contrary to informed suggestions of numerous Jonson scholars, among them William Slights and Richard Dutton. The latter tells us, in fact, that Jonson suffers from “a familiarity that has bred not contempt but complacency, a feeling that he is known, weighted up, comprehended—a colorful character, perhaps, but not the most exciting of writers” (1).
“As a satirist,” he continues, “Jonson is the supreme tactician, an unusually inventive strategist (14)….behind [Jonson’s work] lies an attitude to language itself, an assumption that it is a precision instrument, a divine gift, and to be respected as such by both parties in its interchange. Jonson has little patience for those who cannot or will not appreciate this (83)…[his works are marked by] an oblique invitation to the audience to discover in the work precisely what he is disowning” (52).
Surely this insight into Jonson’s complex motivations as a writer is the basis from which we need to examine his double-edged rhetoric in the folio. Donaldson cites Jonson’s startling punning reference to the bard’s “well-turned and true-filed lines,/in each of which he seems to shake a lance as/brand’sht in the eyes of ignorance.” He does not address, however, what Jonson means by this or whose eyes he might have had in mind.
In short, the further one examines the details of Jonson’s rhetoric the more dubious Donaldson’s more complacent remarks sound and the more one is inclined to indulge his remarkable candor in admitting that the questions raised in Anonymous “are legitimate and provocative questions, which literary and historical scholars ignore at their own peril.”
With this in mind it may be salutary to note that Jonson’s lines claiming that the plays “bear [the author’s] unmistakable DNA” — to quote Donaldson’s felicitous phrase but with an apt turn — echo the very lines of from his droll verses on the Droeshout, cited above, in which he urges the reader to “look not on his picture/but his book.”
Both passages claim that the real bard is to be found not in some external idol such as the Droeshout engraving, but in the body of his own writing.
Now we must pause here for a moment lest we fall into the danger of overlooking the obvious. Since Professor Donaldson is writing primarily as a Jonson scholar this may somewhat excuse him from having to consider the implications of his own argument. If what Jonson is saying is true — that readers may discover the real bard *in his work* — then how are we to account for the fact that Shakespeare is very famously the greatest example of a writer continues to evade biographical plausibility at every turn.
Indeed whole books (e.g. Shapiro’s Contested Will) have been written to deny that what Jonson here seems to claim is necessary is even *possible,* suggesting that the very concept of an autobiographical dimension to literature was unknown to Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatists. In other words, if what Donaldson assures us Jonson is claiming were true, there would be no Shakespearean authorship question.
How are we to reconcile this problem?
We might begin from the observation that the Shakespearean folio is dedicated to, and patronized by, the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, the latter of whom was the husband of none other than Susan Vere, daughter of the 17th Earl of Oxford. Merely being aware of this one fact offers an intriguing new level of connotation to Jonson’s line “see how the father’s face lives in his issue.”
The fact that Oxford’s life, as is by now well recognized in many impressive books, including Charlton Ogburn’s Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984, 1991) and Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name, reads like a rough draft of Hamlet and any number of other plays included in the book in question will take us the next step further.
Donaldson is correct.
The question does matter, although perhaps not for the reasons he believes.
Anonymous was an imperfect vehicle, on that point we agree. However, the film’s exploration of the relationship between Jonson and the real author of the plays seems to me far closer to something that we might call real history than does the tradition of Shakespearean biography apotheosized in the wholly unhistorical Shakespeare In Love. One must ask, therefore, where Professor Donaldson and his colleagues were when that film appeared. I did not hear them complain, although that film was on any number of objective points wholly independent of the authorship question per se *radically* less historical than Anonymous. It was, if the truth be told, mere puffery for the masses. Where were the professors to complain then? They were quiet as church mice. In a church, the great Church of Stratford.