Jonson Our Contemporary
by Joel Schechter
Four centuries after Ben Jonson wrote his plays, new books and essays about them continue to appear each year. Thousands of pages have been devoted to the author of The Alchemist; and yet, the interpretation that locates Jonson most fully as a writer for our time, a playwright of the twenty-first century, could be the next one, the one we do not yet know.
The book Jonson Our Contemporary introduces a playwright for our time, or will, once it is available in America. At present no one knows the author's name, as I understand it, because he or she wrote the manuscript in Russia during Stalin's lifetime, and had to remain anonymous to avoid arrest. (The manuscript is signed "Quarrelsome," clearly a pseudonym.) I am not saying an arrest was warranted, but risks were taken. It appears the author of Jonson Our Contemporary audaciously proposed that Ben Jonson, not Karl Marx, was the world's greatest critic of capitalism. Stalin's censors were not amused, and the manuscript disappeared until recently. While conceding that The Alchemist and Volpone are great farces, the Kremlin at that time (1951) was not prepared to admit any connection between its economic theories and farce.
Nor was America ready for Jonson Our Contemporary during the Cold War. One New York publisher is said to have rejected the Russian manuscript in the 1950s because HUAC (the House UnAmerican Activities Committee) would have started asking actors: "Are you now, or have you ever been, in a Ben Jonson play?" Most actors could deny it, of course, because then, as now, the plays have received far fewer stagings than they deserve.
Whoever wrote the book persuasively argues that Ben Jonson was born too early. Although he was a popular Elizabethan writer, although his portraits of London street life in The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and other plays appealed to audiences at the Globe and Blackfriars, Jonson was no Shakespeare. Shakespeare may have been capable of satire, but Jonson was a great satirist. In The Alchemist and Volpone, his satire of the acquisitive instinct is extraordinary; he was not bad on concupiscence, either. If comparisons must be made, Jonson should be seen as a comrade of other great satirists: Mayakovsky, Ilf and Petrov, (three twentieth-century Russian authors) and Groucho Marx. He is their contemporary, and consequently ours. So argues Quarrelsome. But let him speak for himself, in these excerpts from the first English version of Jonson Our Contemporary: "Yes, Jonson's language is erudite, replete with parody, slang, wordplay and topical allusion, obscure at times; but the same can be said of Groucho Marx's friend, S.J. Perelman."
Quarrelsome admits that the English language has changed since Jonson wrote; today tradesmen, thieves, prostitutes and Puritans on the streets of London might not speak exactly the same vocabulary given to them in The Alchemist. But Jonson Our Contemporary argues that excesses of greed, ambition, hypocrisy and financial ventures ridiculed in the play are alive and well around the world; and wherever they thrive, Jonson's satire should be at home. Citing the financial swindles in The Alchemist as evidence, Quarrelsome declares that Ben Jonson would have loved America's stock market, with its frenzied investors, spectacular crashes, and juicy trading scandals. "Stock brokers are the alchemists of our time," writes the critic, "Las Vegas casino owners run a close second. It is surprising Americans have not honored Jonson more, so many of them share his fascination with get-rich-quick schemes. Their greatest tribute seems to be a patent medicine named after him." [Translator's note: In Russian the words "Johnson and Johnson" can easily be mistaken for the name of the playwright.]
Although Ben Jonson has always been more popular as a poet and playwright than as a political economist, Quarrelsome enlarges upon the critic L.C. Knights' observation that early in the seventeenth century, Jonson confronted the significant developments of his age, most of which "were aspects of the growth of capitalism....company-promoting, 'projecting' and industrial enterprise certainly formed an important part of the world." The burgeoning British Empire imported wealth from the colonies, and in return offered natives and settlers what today would be called hostile takeovers. While living in England, Karl Marx observed that commodities are "thrown into the alchemical retort of circulation" to "come out again in the shape of money." "Could Marx have written such passages in Capital" asks Quarrelsome, "if he had not seen The Alchemist first?"
Jonson did not know Marx's term, "commodity fetishism," Quarrelsome allows; but the playwright shows such activity onstage, as his characters recklessly, madly pursue precious metals and rich widows. Through theatre Jonson inextricably links political economy to the body, renders greed visible in physical ailments (i.e., Volpone in his bed), also in physical comedy and clowning through which actors embody the imbalances, doubletakes, leaps, rises and falls of cupidity. In Quarrelsome's words: "Jonson's audience is privileged to witness a kind of alchemy in action; instead of turning base metal into gold, his plot transforms the falsely pious, the avaricious, and those who would accumulate wealth through others' labor, into fools."
The scoundrels in The Alchemist appeared onstage long before the United States developed its own specialists in deception for profit. Jonson Our Contemporary suggests that Subtle and Face are prototypes for characters Herman Melville depicted in his 1857 novel, The Confidence Man. Melville's title character, like Jonson's in The Alchemist, displays a gift for assuming different costumes and personae much like a versatile stage player. This protean, theatrical artistry - a con artistry - enables the cheats and "self-made men" to invent themselves anew, or unmask and disappear at will, undetected, if circumstances require it.
Other sections of Jonson Our Contemporary praise the playwright for his satire of gender roles. Ben Jonson did not invent cross-gender casting - male actors portrayed women in all Elizabethans drama; but the antics of Dol Common and Pliant in The Alchemist reveal the women's identities as susceptible to change as any. When Surly tells Pliant he has rescued her honor and "preserv'd [her as] a woman," he is mistaken. A woman's reputation, like wealth, is not easy to preserve in Jonson's world, if the woman is a man.
The author of Jonson Our Contemporary kept his or her own identity secret. He does not sound like Anne Barton, Alvin Kernan, Jonas Barish (the late, brilliant Jonson scholar who taught at the Univerisity of California in Berkeley), or Jan Kott, although he may have known them. Kott's survival under authoritarian government in Eastern Europe could have inspired the book's closing paragraphs:
Like the playwright himself, Jonson's greatest rogues are masters of language,
conversant in diverse jargons; their fraudulent impersonations require it, if they are to
pass themselves off as experts. The speech is colloquial at times; but as thieves they
are capable of stealing other people's vocabularies, high flown, poetic lines and
argots. Their language may sound arcane, fraudulent, and nonsensical, but only to
those who have no need of the wealth and joy its speakers promise. That leaves few
of us outside its reach. Here again we find Jonson our contemporary. We are daily
accustomed to hearing nonsense offered as erudition by lawyers and politicians. From
Orwell we have learned about official language invented to obfuscate and mislead.
Place Jonson's alchemists in modern dress, and you have the men Orwell discusses in
"Politics and the English Language," military and state leaders who make "lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and ...give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Jonson Our Contemporary was unpublished, almost lost, during Stalin's lifetime. I am told the manuscript circulated secretly among a small circle of Eastern European theatre scholars until glasnost (openness) arrived, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Publishers in the new, free-market Russia then declined to print it because sales would be unprofitable; they regarded work as too anti-capitalist. One Moscow book editor said: "Jonson is too negative in his assessment of the marketplace. On the streets of London he often must have heard the words "BE RICH," he sensed their allure; but he chose not to join the chorus. Ultimately he is no more than a comic precursor of Marx. Ben Jonson is not my contemporary."
This essay was written for the Berkeley Repertory Theatre program in February, 2000. (c) Joel Schechter