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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Scholarship, like most human activities, has its fashions. One mode very much in the ascendant at the moment is that which concerns itself with the relation between literary forms and other intellectual structures in a given era ; its method might be described as a combination of the history of ideas with a sort of formalism. L. A. Beaurline's recent article on Ben Jonson, in its design and strategy, illustrates this approach.1 The overall design of such a paper may be indicated as follows: the scholar describes a concept for which he claims wide intellectual acceptance; next, he shows how this concept may be traced in certain literary works. After this initial demonstration, his strategy consists primarily of moving between specific works of literature and other manifestations of the concept to show how each class illuminates the other and how each substantiates the other's status. The end of all this activity is not merely increased understanding of the temper of an age, nor is it merely a clearer view of the works under discussion; ideally, it is both.
Note 1 in page 121 “Ben Jonson and the Illusion of Completeness,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 51–59.
Note 2 in page 121 “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.”
Note 3 in page 121 Just how “the distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature” escapes me, and Beaurline does nothing to explain this phenomenon.
Note 4 in page 121 The relevant section is included in pp. 291–93, Vol. xi, of Herford and Simpson (London, 1952). See also J. E. Spingarn, “The Sources of Jonson's ‘Discoveries,‘” MP, 2 (1905), 451–60.
Note 5 in page 121 He uses The Alchemist as a test case, “to consider the impulse toward a kind of controlled completeness, to see if it will bring us a little closer to Jonson's design.”
Note 6 in page 122 The assumption, clearly, is that there is a single design for these plays.
Note 1 in page 125 In his article (p. 51) Mr. Beaurline says, “The distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature, I believe, but Jonson is especially interesting because he is somewhat of a pioneer.” I think he means that Jonson is a pioneer in dramatic method and not a pioneer of a distinction. Or does he mean that the “distinction reverberates” ?
Note 2 in page 125 Mr. Beaurline suggests that in Bartholomew Fair “Jonson had deliberately lowered and limited his art to meet the taste of the audience at the Hope Theater” (p. 57), and that in Epicoene he exposed “the bad taste of the ‘coterie’ audience at the Whitefriars Theater” (p. 58). But the idea of a design which mocks the very audience which applauds it is capable of still further uses. For the perceptive critics in the audience who discern the “satiric edge” of Jonson's method “there is a hint that the vexation, the copious speech, the variety of affliction, and the sport have become the object of comedy.” What relation does such an account have to the actual theater experience of any viewer of Jonson's play ?
Note 3 in page 126 I quote from the 1962 reprint of the 1857–74 Spedding ed.,iv,470.
Note 4 in page 126 Hoskins disagrees with Bacon: “whereas he says that this art of amplifying will betray itself in order and method, I think that it rather adorneth itself.” Then, after giving an example of such amplification and commenting that the “divisions here are taken from age, profession, sex, habit or behavior, and so may be from all circumstances,” he comments that, “This only trick made up J. D.'s Poem of Dancing: all danceth, the heavens, the elements, men's minds, commonwealths, and so by parts all danceth” (pp. 22–23). Does Mr. Beaurline consider Orchestra an example of the “new principle of organization” derived from an idea to which previous scholars “have not paid enough attention” ?