¹ “‘Attic’ Prose in the Seventeenth Century,” SP, xviii (1921), 79–128; “Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon,” Schelling. Anniversary Papers (New York, 1923), pp. 117–150; “Muret and the History of ‘Attic’ Prose,” PMLA, xxxix (June 1924), 254–309.

² In Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Martin Ruud and Kemp Malone (Minneapolis, 1929), pp. 427–456.

³ I continue to use Croll's term “baroque” in preference to the newer and more fashionable term “mannerist” for several reasons. If one adopts the latter word in the sense intended by Ernst Robert Curtius—European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Ser., xxxvi (New York, 1953), pp. 273–301—to mean a recurrent phenomenon in the history of style, when writers cultivate verbal artifice, ornate and dazzling ways of saying things, then one finds that the anti-Ciceronian rhetoric is also antimannerist, since it aims above all to break away from “artificial” patterns of rhetoric. Mannerist writing tends toward extravagance and preciosity; the Senecan writers of the early 17th century aimed, or thought they were aiming, at naturalness. Jonson everywhere expresses a distaste for affectation and “pickedness” in style. So does Bacon, and so does Burton. In fact, the little lexicon of mannerist devices tabulated by Curtius would suggest “mannerist” as an appropriate term not for anti-Ciceronian prose, but for Euphuism, Arcadian prose, and for the heavily conceited, word-catching style of the sonnet sequences of the 1590's and such plays as The Spanish Tragedy.

Similar objections apply if we borrow the term “mannerist” from art historians to denote a specific period of literary history pervaded by a recognizable style. For Wylie Sypher—Four Stages of Renaissance Style, Doubleday Anchor Books (New York, 1955), pp. 100–179 and passim—mannerism designates a phase of English literature represented by the poems of Donne, the problem plays of Shakespeare, and the prose writers whom Croll calls baroque. This, in turn, requires us to distinguish a mannerist prose style of the early 17th century from a true baroque style exemplified for Sypher by the prose of John Milton. But it is not at all clear that such a distinction really exists, or at any rate that it is more meaningful than the distinction between two such writers as Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. I continue to use, therefore, what seems to me for the moment the more serviceable term. George Williamson's objections to “baroque” are perhaps less radical, and will be discussed elsewhere below.

⁴ All citations from Jonson will be to the edition of C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1925–52). The following abbreviations are used: Disc.— Timber, or Discoveries; CR—Cynthia's Revels; EMO—Every Man Out of His Humour; Poet.—Poetaster; BF—Bartholomew Fair; SW—Epicoene, or The Silent Woman; NNW—News from the New World Discovered in the Moon; Pan—Pan's Anniversary; King's Ent.—The King's Entertainment in passing to his Coronation; Chlor.—Chloridia.

⁵ Croll, “Baroque Style,” p. 433.

⁶ The transference of language from the printed page to the speaking voice of actors in a theater involves, necessarily, a whole host of accommodations. Most of these, however, occur on the level of phonology, and hence are properly analyzable only by rigorous microlinguistic techniques, including scrutiny of phonetic sequences, stresses, pitch, juncture, and the like. Even for a contemporary text, it is doubtful whether such an analysis would produce very satisfactory results. George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr.—An Outline of English Structure, Stud, in Linguistics, Occasional Papers, 3 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1951), p. 51—list at least 8 different ways of saying “How do they study?” where the variations are confined entirely to pitch, stress, internal juncture and terminal juncture, and even so are not exhaustive. When we deal with such far more complex utterances as Jonson's sentences, when we take into account the problems of declamation in a theater whose declamatory techniques are at best only half-understood by us, in a language 300 years old whose phonology has been only fragmentarily reconstructed, we are facing a set of variables so formidable as to suggest that any useful phonological appraisal of Jonson's dramatic prose would be a will-o'-the-wisp. One must, then, confess a certain helplessness to deal with this aspect of the problem, and confine oneself to reiterating truisms, such as the fact that a good playwright somehow contrives to make his speeches eminently speakable, that—as every actor knows—an intricate sentence of Congreve can be pronounced more trippingly on the tongue than a simpler one from William Archer's translation of Ibsen, because the former was written by an expert in theatrical speech, and the latter was not.

One can, of course, in Jonson's case, point to certain features of phonetic realism—his tendency to substitute the -s ending of third-person singular verbs for the more literary -eth inflection, his increasing use of clipped forms such as 'hem for them,—and to his employment, on a massive scale, of fashionable phrases and cant terms that he would have scorned to use in his own person. But on the level with which I am primarily concerned—that of sentence structure—significant differences between the stage prose and the non-dramatic prose are far to seek, precisely because of the nature of the baroque rhetoric to which Jonson was committed. What Jonson does, in fact, as I hope to be showing throughout this paper, is to take syntactic strategies normal in his critical writing and utilize them on the stage for specifically theatrical purposes, for characterization and effects of “realism” and satire.

⁷ That the stile coupé, as Jonson adapts it for the stage, is stylistic and not a mere accident of pointing may be verified by reference to other Elizabethan play texts where the punctuation, through the vagaries of the printing house, comes out all commas or semicolons but where nothing else suggests the movement of thought peculiar to the curt style. One might compare Falstaff's speech beginning “I do here walk before thee like a sow that hath o'erwhelm'd all her litter but one” in the 1600 quarto of 77 Henry IV (sig. B₂), punctuated entirely by commas until the question mark after stoppes, with the Folio version, which quite properly repunctuates the passage into an orderly sequence of complete sentences (sig. G^v). And one might further compare the differing techniques used by dramatists other than Jonson to secure the effects of distraction, garrulity, etc., for which Jonson used the curt style. Leonarde, the old servant in The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, Pompey in Measure for Measure, and many others will illustrate the fact that the transmutation of raw speech into dramatic language, even when the end product is itself something disheveled and incoherent, involves a definite stylistic procedure.

⁸ The Senecan Amble, pp. 145 and 156, n. 1.

⁹ The Advancement of Learning, Everyman ed., p. 24.

¹⁰ The Senecan Amble, pp. 89, 115, 118, 120, 184, and passim.

¹¹ “English Prose Style,” Miscellaneous Essays (New York, 1892), p. 7.

¹² Hyperbaton, as this practice is called, is one of the few “mannerist” devices tabulated by Curtius (p. 274) to be found in Jonson.

¹³ For the possessive as antecedent of a relative pronoun—standard Elizabethan practice—see A. C. Partridge, Studies in the Syntax of Ben Jonson's Plays (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 46–47

¹⁴ On tense shift as a characteristic of baroque poetry see Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Góngora and Milton: Toward a Definition of the Baroque,” CL, vi (1954), 53–63.

¹⁵ The fact that other writers do the same thing under similar circumstances leads one to suspect a convention at work here. See for instance Dekker, The Magnificent Entertainment, Unes 67–76, 175–179, 309–312, 456–465, 497–500, 831–845, etc., in The Dramatic Works, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1953–55), ii, 220–303, and Middleton, The Triumphs of Truth and Civitatis Amor in Works, ed. A. H. Bullen (Boston, 1886), vii, 239, 284–285, etc.

¹⁶ Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, translator unnamed, 7th ed. (New York, n.d.), p. 50—speaking, to be sure, not about prose style but about the visual arts. From Wölfflin, of course, come all of the terms for Renaissance and baroque used in this paragraph.

¹⁷ A History of English Prose Rhythm (London, 1912), p. 205.