Happy Birthday, Ovid!

[Dave Monroe]

... not to mention B.F. Skinner, Frederick W. Taylor and Friedrich 
Holderlin, but, having just picked up that Norton Critical Ed. of Ben 
Jonson's Plays and Masques (Ed Robert M. Adams [the very same RMA who 
translated that Villiers de L'Isle Adam novel, Tomorrow's Eve, I've 
mentioned from time to time].  NY: Norton [duh], 1970) and read Harry 
Levin's "Jonson's Metempsychosis" (pp. 415-22, originally published in 
Philological Quarterly XXII, 3 [July, 1943]) over an enormous bowl of 
oatmeal brulee (really--and if you can get a bowl of oatmeal for $4 in this 
town, God knows what it's going for on the coasts) a few excerpts  which, 
while probably not what Kevin had intended us to note here, resonate 
nonetheless ...

"Ben Jonson often professed to be more concerned with men than with 
monsters.  Yet the chorus of Volpone is a trio of deformed servants ....  At 
intervals throughout the play ... they appear as the zanies of their 
mountebank mater, and reduce his intrigues to their own level of 
absurdity....  Out of hand it is easy to consider this scene an excrescence; 
a French critic would even call for its suppression.  So painstaking a 
playwright as Jonson, however, deserves to have his intentions more 
sympathetically explored: more recent scholarship would look to this very 
episode for a statement of his theme.  In that case it must be admitted that 
the development is clearer than the theme, for the passage in question is 
undeniably obscure.  I venture to suggest that this obscurity may be 
clarified by relating the subject ... to the thought of Jonson's age ..." 
(415-6)

[by the way, the specific bit in question seems to be Volpone, I.ii., 63-66, 
but that's incidental for me at the moment]

"Jonson's commentators, always more sensitive to classical echoes than to 
vernacular allusions ....  Actually it is ... one of the commonest measures 
in the old English moralities ..." (416)

"a vehicle for bringing old-fashioned ideas of good and evil to bear upon 
the new commercial enterprises of the Jacobean period."  (416)

"Now the main theme of Volpone is a comic distortion of a theme that is 
tragic in Hamlet an tragicomic in The Malcontent, the pervasive Jacobean 
theme of disinheritance." (417)

"cheated of their legacies" (417)

"This intermixture of Puritanism and Pythagoreanism does not seem to have 
been peculiar to Jonson." (418)

"But Jonson has his own reasons for accusing the Puritans of shifting their 
coats as often as the soul of Pythagoras changed it shape, and of 'counting 
all old  doctrine heresie.'  Jonson, 'in these days of reformation,' was for 
twelve years a convert to Roman Catholicism."  (418)

"Volpone was written at the height of the Gunpowder Plot.  Sir Politick 
Wouldbe, with his genius for spying plots everywhere ... is a caricature of 
the kind of suspicions from which Jonson must have been suffering." (418)

"his fascination and exasperation with the poetry of John Donne" (419)

"the progress of the Soul ....  The poem itself, in picaresque fashion, 
traces the wandering spirit of heresy from the Garden of Eden through 
various flora and faunas as far as Cain's wife." (419)

"Hamlet, it should also be noted, is obsessed with a perverse notion of 
metempsychosis: his conceits follow the progress of a king through the guts 
of a beggar ..." (419)

"To reconcile the values of this world with the ethics of traditional 
Christianity, or to justify the ways of men to God .... [For Donne,] The 
logical solution was an ethical relativism which accepted the Reformation as 
a necessary evil and regarded the aging queen as neither good nor bad but 
great." (420)

"Satire springs from some perception of the disparities between the real and 
the ideal.  Hence the satirist's position is always shifting; sooner or 
later, he must embrace one extreme or the other.  Donne, in choosing 
religion, chose the idealistic extreme.  Jonson chose realism ..." (420)

"... reading between the lines, we can see the plot already hatching that 
will pit the jargon of the alchemists against the rival cant of the 
Puritans, and confuse everything--in the nick of time--" (421)

"the sinister magnificence of Volpone is supposed to be real" (421)

"folly and roguery are the two staples of Jonsonian comedy" (422)

"Mankind was subdivided, it now seemed, not into good men and bad, but into 
rogues and fools.  Consequently, the role of the comic playwright was not to 
judge but to observe."  (422)

But I've got to run, so ...

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