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The Sign of the Light Heart: Jonson's ‘The New Inn’, 1629 and 1987

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Peter Womack
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Abstract

In NTQ 14. Graham Holderness welcomed the Swan at Stratford as the home, at once new and old, of a ‘radical energy’ opposed to the ‘ossified establishment’ in the main house. Here Peter Womack, concentrating on John Caird's 1987 production of The New Inn, suggests a different and more suspicious interpretation of the building and its uses. By a sort of historical coincidence, the conservative nostalgia of Jonson's play reveals the close links between the Swan project and that distinctively 1980s construction of the national past – the heritage industry. Peter Womack, who lectures in English at the University of East Anglia, is the author of a book on Ben Jonson in the ‘Rereading Literature’ series. This article is based on a paper given to a conference on the politics of early seventeenth-century drama, Oxford, June 1988.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 18 , May 1989 , pp. 162 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

Notes and References

1. Wright, Patrick, On Living in an Old Country: the National Past in Contemporary Britain (Verso, 1985), p. 177–8.Google Scholar

2. Nunn, Trevor, Foreword to Cook, Judith, At the Sign of the Swan: an Introduction to Shakespeare's Contemporaries (Harrap, 1986), p. 9–12.Google Scholar

3. The Times, 15 May 1986, p. 15.

4. The Times, 15 May 1986, p. 14.

5. Nunn, Foreword to Judith Cook, At the Sign of the Swan.

6. The Times, 17 April 1986, p. 18.

7. Hewison, Robert, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (Methuen, 1987), p. 133–4.Google Scholar

8. Barton, Ann, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 258–84Google Scholar; Jonson, Ben, The New Inn, ed. Hattaway, Michael in the ‘Revels Plays’ series (Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 28Google Scholar (subsequent references to the play itself are to this edition); Trussler, Simon, ‘Commentary’ to Jonson, Ben, The New Inn, in the ‘Swan Theatre Plays’ series (Methuen, 1987).Google Scholar

9. Barton, Ben Jonson, p. 281.

10. See the 1988 ‘Stop-Over’ leaflet, issued by the RSC. The most expensive of the hotels are converted manor houses, and so offer the additional sensation of staying with the landed gentry: as in The New Inn, the host turns out to be a lord.

11. For example, read the ‘Ode to Himself’ (Miscellaneous Poems, XXXIII), together with the roughly contemporary ‘Epigram. To King Charles’ and ‘Humble Petition of Poor Ben’ (Underwoods, LXII and LXXVI), all in Jonson, Ben, The Complete Poems, ed. Parfitt, G. (Penguin, 1975).Google Scholar

12. Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641, abridged edn. (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 308–9.Google Scholar

13. Stone, op. cit., Chapter 3, and especially p. 49.

14. For a forceful statement of the view that Buckingham's removal cleared the way for a Caroline ‘cultural revolution’, see Orgel, Stephen, ‘Plato, the Magi, and Caroline Politics: a reading of The Temple of Love ’,Word and Image, IV (1988), p. 663–77Google Scholar. A similar argument, with different emphases, is advanced by Smuts, R. M., Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 7, ‘Charles I and the Consolidation of a Court Culture’. Martin Butler's paper at the conference ‘The Politics of Drama 1610–1650’, Oxford, June 1988, argued that The New Inn is a seminal text of 1630s court culture.

15. At the end of B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528), arguably one of the direct sources for Lovel's discourse on love.

16. This strain of ‘emergent middle-class values’ within Jonson's aristocratism is brilliantly discussed in Wayne, Don E., Penshurst: the Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Methuen, 1984), p. 150–65.Google Scholar

17. Ann Barton, op. cit., p. 271.

18. Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution (Penguin, 1965), p. 345–8.Google Scholar