May put out both the eyes of our Saint Mark;
A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in like star-light, hid with jewels....
is related to Marlowe as a poet; and if Marlowe is a poet, Jonson is also. And, if Jonson’s comedy is a comedy of humours, then Marlowe’s tragedy, a large part of it, is a tragedy of humours. But Jonson has too exclusively been considered as the typical representative of a point of view toward comedy. He has suffered from his great reputation as a critic and theorist, from the effects of his intelligence. We have been taught to think of him as the man, the dictator (confusedly in our minds with his later namesake), as the literary politician impressing his views upon a generation; we are offended by the constant reminder of his scholarship. We forget the comedy in the humours, and the serious artist in the scholar. Jonson has suffered in public opinion, as anyone must suffer who is forced to talk about his art.
If you examine the first hundred lines or more of Volpone the verse appears to be in the manner of Marlowe, more deliberate, more mature, but without Marlowe’s inspiration. It looks like mere “rhetoric,” certainly not “deeds and language such as men do use”! It appears to us, in fact, forced and flagitious bombast. That it is not “rhetoric,” or at least not vicious rhetoric, we do not know until we are able to review the whole play. For the consistent maintenance of this manner conveys in the end an effect not of verbosity, but of bold, even shocking and terrifying directness. We have difficulty in saying exactly what produces this simple and single effect. It is not in any ordinary way due to management of intrigue. Jonson employs immense dramatic constructive skill: it is not so much skill in plot as skill in doing without a plot. He never manipulates as complicated a plot as that of The Merchant of Venice; he has in his best plays nothing like the intrigue of Restoration comedy. In Bartholomew Fair it is hardly a plot at all; the marvel of the play is the bewildering rapid chaotic action of the fair; it is the fair itself, not anything that happens to take place in the fair. In Volpone, or The Alchemist, or The Silent Woman, the plot is enough to keep the players in motion; it is rather an “action” than a plot. The plot does not hold the play together; what holds the play together is a unity of inspiration that radiates into plot and personages alike.
We have attempted to make more precise the sense in which it was said that Jonson’s work is “of the surface”; carefully avoiding the word “superficial.” For there is work contemporary with Jonson’s which is superficial in a pejorative sense in which the word cannot be applied to Jonson—the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. If we look at the work of Jonson’s great contemporaries, Shakespeare, and also Donne and Webster and Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton), have a depth, a third dimension, as Mr. Gregory Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson’s work has not. Their words have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson’s most certainly have not; but in Beaumont and Fletcher we may think that at times we find it. Looking closer, we discover that the blossoms of Beaumont and Fletcher’s imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand.
Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me,
As thou shalt hear nothing but infamy,
Remember some of these things?...
I pray thee, do; for thou shalt never see me so again.