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Ovid, Juvenal, and The Silent Woman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Jonas A. Barish
Jonas A. Barish*
Affiliation:
University of CaliforniaBerkeley 4
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Extract

Epicene, or The Silent Woman, which Jonson's own century admired perhaps more than any other of his plays, has suffered the fate of becoming more instead of less enigmatic as time passes. Recent critics, more bothered than Jonson's contemporaries over the question of what, finally, the play is all about, have drifted into debates over whether it is a comedy or a farce, whether it is moral or immoral (or amoral), whether its prevailing tone is one of gaiety or harshness. One can lump many of these questions together and rephrase them in terms of Jonson's own dramatic development by asking to what extent Epicene preserves the stern morality of the earlier plays and to what extent it shares the geniality and relaxed moral temper of the later plays as typified by Bartholomew Fair. Probably the answer is that as a transitional play it combines both, and not always in the happiest fashion. The gaiety skates uncomfortably close to sadism; the judicial sternness, rejected in the person of Morose, is rejected with such supererogatory fierceness that it attracts a strong countercurrent of sympathy to it. The victory of Truewit over Morose represents Jonson's attempt to assert the values of the world and the flesh over the consolations of philosophy. But Jonson is still too committed to the philosopher's study to abandon it casually, and still too repelled by the vanity of courts to embrace it without a shudder. The result is that what he attempts to affirm on one level he denies on another. The effort to substitute an indulgent, “realistic” account of the world in place of his more habitual and more deeply felt satirical view produces ambiguities of tone which trouble the whole structure of the play.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 1956 , pp. 213 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 Since one or more of these questions is almost invariably raised in any commentary on the play, it seems unnecessary to supply exhaustive references. On the question of tone, however, see, roughly in favor of gaiety, Dryden, Essays, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1926), i, 86; Elizabeth Woodbridge, Studies in Jonsonian Comedy, Yale Stud, in Eng., v (Boston, 1898), p. 30; Aurelia Henry, ed. Epicoene, Yale Stud, in Eng., xxxi (New York, 1906), p. v; Maurice Castelain, Ben Jonson (Paris, 1907), p. 326; G. Gregory Smith, Ben Jonson, English Men of Letters (London, 1919), p. 113; John Palmer, Ben Jonson (London, 1934), p. 176; John J. Enck, “Ben Jonson's Imagery” (MS. diss., Harvard Univ., 1951), p. 291 et passim in the chapter on Epicene; and, emphasizing bitterness, Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson (London, 1889), p. 51; Harry Levin, ed. Ben Jonson (New York, 1938), p. 20; and Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thiñkers, rev. ed. (New York, 1948), p. 216.

2 Documentation of Jonson's indebtedness to these works was begun by James Upton in his Remarks on Three Plays of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1749), pp. 59–94, continued by Jonson's 19th-century editor William Gifford in Vol. iii of the collected Works (London, 1816), and brought to approximate finality by 20th-century editors, Aurelia Henry, ed. Epicoene, pp. xxviii–lv, and C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925–52), x, 1–46. The present essay is concerned not with discovering new parallels, but with interpreting those already well known.

3 Edmund Wilson's view, that “through Morose … Jonson is tormenting himself for what is negative and recessive in his nature” (Triple Thinkers, p. 221), offers a psychoanalytic explanation for this phenomenon.

4 Citations to Ovid are from The Art of Love and Other Poems, ed. J. H. Mozley, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), and unless otherwise specified will be to the Ars amatoria.

5 Citations to Epicene will be from Herford and Simpson, v, 139–272.

6 De meiicamine faciei liber, ll. 51–100, in The Art of Love and Other Poems.

7 Compare the effect of another roughly contemporaneous translation, attributed to Thomas Heywood: “For praises please the chastest maids delight, / To heare their lovers in their praise to write”—Publii Ovidii Nasonis, De Arte amandi [n.p., n.d.], sig. B6. For the problems of attribution and bibliography connected with this translation, see Arthur Melville Clark, “Thomas Heywood's Art of Love Lost and Found,” Library, 4th Ser., iii (1922), 210–222.

8 Cf. Edward Kennard Rand, Ovid and his Influence (Boston, 1925), p. 42: “For all its naughtiness, the poem is not without its ethical lessons. The poet constructs a kind of Mirror of the Chivalrous Lover. … Patience and courtesy are the cardinal virtues, anger and pride the deadly sins.” This would seem to be so even if one accepts C. S. Lewis' view (The Allegory of Love, London, 1936, pp. 6 ff.) that the courtly code of the Ars amaloria is meant to be felt as something absurd and shameful. Ovid may deprecate the world he is evoking; he does not, like Jonson, destroy it in the process.

9 All citations to Juvenal will be to Juvenal and Persius, ed. G. G. Ramsay, Loeb Classical Library, rev. ed. (London, 1940); line references will be to the 6th Satire.

10 It is worth recalling, in this connection, that in Poetaster Ovid himself was made a symbol for poetic talent debased by worldly affections. See Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif., 1938), pp. 112–117, 124–128.

11 The concluding simile derives from Juvenal also: “unus Hiberinae vir sufficit? Ocius illud / extorquebis, ut haec oculo contenta sit uno” (53–54).

12 Jonson's third chief classical source, the 6th Declamation of Libanius, supports the Juvenalian side of the Ovid-Juvenal antithesis quite strongly. A misogyny as burning as Juvenal's comes out in this terrifying portrait of a woman who never can be still, who turns every detail of life into a pretext for talk, who bedevils her husband with long recitations on history and literature, or recites interminable tales of the doings of the neighbors, and who cannot be silent even when she sleeps. Like Jonson's Morose, Libanius's Morosus has a fundamental complaint against all of humanity; he has shut himself up not only to avoid noise, but to escape the follies and importunities that social living necessarily entrain.

13 Endimion iii.iii. 50–51.