(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

 

192

…Die: seemes it not enough, thy Writing’s date                        

Is endlesse, but thine owne prolonged Fate

Must equall it? for shame, engrosse not Age,

But now, thy fifth Act’s ended, leave the stage,

And lett us clappe.
 

For Oldisworth, Jonson had “noe fault, but Life.”
 

193

…abject lesson in the hazards of constructing a monument to oneself in mid-life—and then…surviving long enough to see one’s Workes proclaimed one’s cenotaph.
 

“Thy workes make us mistake / Thy person”…
 

…Oldisworth…wishes to adore a pure, stellified Folio, removed for its author’s intrusive…presence.
 

…critic of The New Inne… “The other workes, rais’d by thy skillful hand, / . . . [that] shall stand / As Monuments of thee”
 

…requires the sons’ intervention. The Jonson who refuses to “Die, for [his]…own sake”…is, to their minds, engaging in a high-risk behavior…
 

…Oldisworth, Felltham, Carew, Goodwin…Cavalier offspring…conservers… of the definitive, canonized Workes.
 

… “Stellification…method of disposal…the heirs…claiming to be the custodians of the true, unchanging text.

 

194

…Jasper Mayne… “wee all conspir’d to make thy Herse / Our Workes”…
 

…involved, out of envy, in a hostile takeover.
 

…the Workes are disputed property; once Jonson’s, they are now “ours.”
 

… “no Posteritie / Can adde” … or better the Folio…
 

…the Workes… can have only custodians…
 

… “th’had their whole growth then / When first borne, and came aged form thy Pen”…
 

…Richard Newton has called their “closed coherence.”… Jonson became a textual poet by discovering the potential of print to “endow [a] . . . text with autonomy.”…
 

..impression of completeness and self-containment…legitimized Jonson’s… “coercive authority.”

 

By the last decade of Jonson’s life…Folio…canonical life independent of its author…

 

The Workes supplanted Jonson as the authority…

 

The poet’s monument to himself had become an albatross, or at least a barrier to new work.

 

Note: …timothy Murray… “Whereas the domain of the public theatre might be understood to nurture significational free play and intertextuality, the printed text offers the playwright the opportunity to transcend authorial anonymity and linguistic ruin through various operations of textual self-representation. The textual materialization of authorship thus enacts the regeneration of the figure of the Self through its objectification in the printed text.”
 

Unprecedented closure of the kind Jonson engaged in by exploiting the fixity of print had unforeseen consequences.
 

195

William Cartwright’s elegy…captures what it can mean to be “read as Classick in [one’s] . . . life.
 

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196

Under-wood maps the topography of the body’s decay…
 

…origin. Jonson’s 1616 Folio can be said…to have achieved a place and status outside “the time of the body and its voice.” Under-wood…explores another terrain, the untranscended body.

 

…projected into a world (“human time”) that no longer has space for it and which spurns its gross materiality…grotesque.
 

197

Jonson’s answer in Discoveries to contemporaries who claimed Shakespeare “never blotted out line” is famous: “Would he had blotted a thousand.” …in Under-wood he commends John Selden’s rigor… “What blots and errours, have you . . . purg’d / Records, and Authors of!” to blot out for Jonson means to purge one’s writing of excrescences; the revised work is bounded by the compass of the poet’s critical judgment. In the poem to Burlase, however, Jonson’s body expands to “one great blot.”
 

198

…at this moment of self-reckoning, Jonson is not Selden’s ally…Shakespeare’s scold.
 

In Under-wood the body engrosses age, space, the matter that is the unregenerate stuff of satire.
 

199

…downward spiral of Jonson’s career narrated in these poems of the body…
 

200

…as an unwanted chattel that breaks chairs and cracks coaches, Jonson’s body inflicts itself on his culture. He is in turn afflicted by his contemporaries’ rejection of that body…
 

It is not the magisterial Jonson of the 1616 Folio Workes the Caroline sons vilify in their invectives of the 1630’s. It is the Jonson who falters, who in eclipse turns inward to salvage what he can of a self fragmenting before their collective gaze, whose vulnerability licenses parricide.
 

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201

By 1629, Jonson was experiencing the indignities that came with age, penury, obesity, and disabling strokes.
 

… he writes himself into the past tense and speaks as though from beyond the grave….
 

…censures circulated by his increasingly vocal detractors…were widely read, are performance pieces. Their vitriol gets out of hand. The sons hurl Molotov cocktails of abuse, spatter insults calculated to enrage and maim. Invariably, the locus for hostility is the poet’s body. The parricides chart its decay in fulsome detail, in language appropriated form Jonson’s own work…
 

202

MY LORD;

Poore wretched states, prest by extremities,

Are faine to seeke for succours, and supplies

Of Princes aides, or good mens Charities.
 

Disease, the Enemie, and his Ingineeres,

Want, with the rest of his conceal’d compeeres,

Have cast a trench about mee, now, five yeares;
 

…………………..

The Muse not peepes out, one of hundred dayes;
 

But lyes block’d up, and straightned, narrow’d in,

Fix’d to the bed, and boords, unlike to win

Health, or scarce breath . . .
 

Unlesse some saving-Honour of the Crowne,

Dare thinke it, to relieve, no lesse renowne,

A bed-rid Wit, then a beseiged Towne.
 

…The Magnetic Lady… 1632, Alexander Gill…align himself with Jonson’s ascendant rival, Inigo Jones, in trumpeting the play’s failure.
 

203

…Gill advises him to return to bricklaying—the profession his class origins better suit him for.
 

Butt to advise thee, Ben, in this strict Age

A Brickehill’s fitter for thee then a stage;

Thou better knowes a groundsell how to Laye

Than lay the plott or groundeworke of A playe,

And better canst derecte to Capp a chimney

Then to Converse with Clio, or Polihimny.

Fall then to worke, In thy old Age agen

Take upp thy Trugg and Trowell, gentle Ben.
 

“Listen (decaying Ben) and Counsell heare”… anonymously-authored attack on The New Inne…tonal quality…Shakespeare in King Lear.
 

204

…last years…Disease and want and the “parricides in verse” contended for the poet’s carcass.
 

205

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by 1629, new plays and poems were being hailed by his contemporaries as evidence of the poet’s decline, blots on the first Folio’s perfection. The Caroline sons are determined through their critiques to detach these superfluous limbs form the canonized Workes.
 

The self “gathers itself together” as “we” or as “Ben / Jonson ,” but it is now a self capable of being dispersed into parts or split between Pindaric stanzas. The 1616 Folio had been constructed to militate against that possibility.
 

In the Folio, they are preserved form dispersion, form the anonymity of the anthology or the vulnerability of the manuscript to destruction.
 

…The Life of the Poet, Lipking…poet’s ambition is “less to write great individual verses: than to make of his life’s work “a poetical autobiography in the shape of a single book…
 

206

…a model career that will culminate in the making of a penultimate book, or summa.
 

Under-wood presents itself as a lesser appendage to the Folio.
 

… “lesser Poems, of later growth”…
 

The editorial rigor with which Jonson had prepared the Folio for publication, and in particular his laborious revisions of texts and suppression of certain others, had effectively stifled evidence of the poet’s development…
 

…tentatively, he began to affirm the imperfect in himself.
 

…he allows historical contingency a new prominence in his poetry.
 

207

Epigrammes dates only one poem. Under-wood’s titles insist on the occasion (and, to some degree, the occasionality)…eleven poems are given explicit dates…others…to Lord Ellesmere “the last Terme he sate Chancellor”…Sir Edward Coke “when he was Lord chiefe Justice of England”…
 

…incomplete works;…presence as truncated texts complements Under-wood’s focus on loss, its muted affirmation of the imperfect.
 

…vulnerability…permitted Jonson, subsequent to the Folio, a “later growth.”
 

210
 

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…in Jonson’s later work…diminished circumstances…utter dependency on others—the Digby family, the king and the bureaucrats dispensing his charity at increasingly irregular intervals, the unnamed woman Jonson lived with…
 

…Under-wood. “Eupheme”… is the work in which Jonson “summe[d] up mine owne breaking”…
 

…fragments…span some twenty years of the poet’s career.
 

…I feele

Nothing I doe; but, like a heavie wheele,

Am turned with an others powers.
 

211

…read that ‘metaphor’ of fortune’s inexorably revolving wheel with a certain stubborn literalism.
 

Jonson was bedridden by 1633…”govern’d” by the woman “with whome he livd and dyed” near Westminster Abbey.
 

212

…stress in “Eupheme” on his dependency:…on his muse…on patrons…memories of better days…anonymous mistress for the nursing his condition…
 

…the body in Jonson’s later poetry becomes a locus of misfortune…immobilized by recurrent strokes…”perish, piece, by piece”… be kept “dying a whole age”…
 

…disease…as Susan Sontag has …argued, resists the consoling transformations of metaphor.
 

…life, the body is the muse’s precarious habitation. “Eupheme” anticipates the ‘fleshes restitution” after death, at the “last Trumpe.” For Lady Digby…elevation into the ranks of the elect.
 

…God “can dissect / The smallest Fibre of our flesh; he can / Find all our Atomes form a point t[o] a span.” Broken by disease in life, dispersed after death into fibres and atoms, the body is resurrected and reconstituted.
 

…a new nobility…others…God’s dissecting judgment awaits…
 

213

“some grounds are made the richer, for the Rest: / And I will bring a Crop, if not the best.” That, for Jonson, is what it meant to have a “Soyle, not barren” in his old age. And that is also the achievement of his Under-wood, not substance got with ease—the 1616 Folio must have seemed that in retrospect…